Showing posts with label Jungle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jungle. Show all posts

Global Biosphere Collapse

SUBHEAD: The human family is spinning through space upon a naturally evolved living organism that it is killing.

By Dr Glen Barry on 24 October 2016 for Counter Currents -
(http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/10/24/global-biosphere-collapse-the-end-of-being-upon-us/)


Image above: Leopard on a branch over river in the Amazon Jungle. From (http://www.wallpaperhd.pk/amazon-jungle-wallpaper/).

Miraculous nature is being murdered. Everywhere we look inequitable over-consumption is devastating the natural ecosystems that sustain a living Earth. Together we yield to ecological truth – personally embracing a global ecology ethic, and demanding others do so as well – or we all needlessly die at each others’ throats as the global ecological system collapses and being ends.

The Signs
Everywhere you look humans are destroying nature. We are eating the ecosystems that sustain us, crapping in our own habitat, calling it development as we destroy our one shared biosphere.

Look outside your window. Chances are that the “nature” you see – some degraded secondary forests, power lines and roadways, with disturbed soil and degraded waterways – was a million year old naturally evolved ecosystem but a few generations ago. Never has naturally evolved magnificence been so swiftly dismantled to produce throw away consumer crap.

We are witnessing the age of ecocidal, conspicuous, and inequitable over-consumption. 90% of old growth forests have been mowed and large ocean fish harvested. Half of both natural soil and vegetation have been destroyed. Oceans are dying from bottom trawling, acidification, and over-harvest.

Abrupt and runaway climate change is well underway as humanity continues to treat our atmosphere as a waste dump. We piss and worse into our natural waterways as billions lack clean drinking water. Plants and animals as well as people are fleeing collapsing ecosystems.

And most people are too fucking dumb to realize what is occurring, little more than microbes being pickled in their own waste as their and all being ends.

The Outlook
China is going to ecologically collapse first, as industrial filth on behalf of all nations has proliferated, and it will be soon. Collapse of this ecocidal tyranny may well by itself pull down the biosphere.

Similarly India and Europe are most at risk – where millennia of ecological simplification, along with tremendous over-population, will ensure mass migration and conflict until these population bases are brought into balance once again with natural ecosystems.

The United States may persist longer as the ecocide has not occurred for as long. But here nationalistic militarism along with an unparalleled sense of entitlement, and a lack of understanding of community and the natural world, is perhaps most dangerous. If every American is not allowed to realize their exceptional birthright of wantonly overconsuming, they damn well will destroy everybody and everything in fits of infantile rage.

Prepare to see the vegetation, what remains, wither and die. Get used to there being no water in the tap much less locally available. Be ready for major energy shocks where your car sits lifeless in the driveway, a chunk of immobile metal, as your house remains unheated and uncooled. Consider what food can be raised locally, and at what price, as that is all that will be available.

Expect bands of marauders to pillage your belongings and have their way with your wives and daughters. The re-emergence of slavery and warring autocratic city-states is a virtual certainty as centuries of social progress are jettisoned.

Entire bioregions are going to be laid to waste and have to be evacuated as they become uninhabitable. Mass migration at unprecedented scales is imminent.

Given uncertainly in lag times, and what wells of ecological resiliency remain in the Earth System, it is difficult to know how long it will be until the biosphere goes into positive feedback and collapses and dies. It is also virtually impossible to know when it is too late and will occur regardless.

That is why we must seek an ecological ethic and way of life until our dying breath. Despite its shortcomings, ecocidal inclinations in particular, the human species is an amazing creature.

Our ability to think abstractly, examining and learning from our natural surroundings, are unsurpassed. Our opposable thumbs are cool too. Now if we could learn to not destroy nature we will be set to live essentially forever as a species.

The Options
We have everything we need to construct a just, equitable, and verdant future for all. Plentiful renewable energy sources exist. We know how to recreate natural ecosystems and permaculture gardens from the plant diversity that remains. Educating girls, providing free birth control, and economic incentives for small families can stabilize and then reduce the population.

Throughout human history we see time and time again people coming together to do what must be done to beat back evil, reset the social order, and advance. Together we will have to shutdown the fossil fuel industry, demand global demilitarization and demobilization, and insist upon a reduction in the size and influence of corporations and governments alike.

So much of our prospects depend upon living more simply and naturally. That is why posing, preening “climate activists” like Leonardo DiCaprio are so dangerous. They tell us climate change is real from the back of a polluting private jet, spewing emissions from luxurious lifestyles that the majority seek but can never attain. We are going to have to learn to live more simply materially, as we explore the rich abundance in knowledge, sport, arts, leisure, and making love.

A global ecology ethic based upon ecological truths must arise spontaneously utilizing all the tools at our disposal including the Internet.

We must come to realize we are one human family spinning through space upon a naturally evolved living organism upon which we are utterly dependent. Gaia’s ecosystem organs – old-growth forests, natural waterways, bountiful oceans, vibrant soils – will be restored and maintained at all costs as global ecological reserves to power the biosphere and maintain a living and livable Earth.

Such a global ecological ethic goes well beyond the obvious and demands a complete reorganization of the dominant paradigm. We perish unless we come to accept the truthful worldview that nation states are a lie, there is no god, and ecology is the meaning of life.

Together we embrace and act upon ecology and other self-evident truths or we face vicious, merciless death at each others’ hands as we collapse the biosphere. And then being ends.

• Dr. Glen Barry is the President and Founder of Ecological Internet (EI). He is recognized internationally by the environmental movement as a leading global visionary, ecological policy critic and public intellectual committed to communicating the severity of global ecological crises – and related justice, rights and equity issues – while actively organizing with others sufficient solutions.

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End Amazon Crude!

SUBHEAD: The Amazon is Earth's most important carbon sink, most biodiverse rainforest, inhabited by indigenous people.

By Mike Goworecki on 30 September 2016 for Monga Bay -
(https://news.mongabay.com/2016/09/u-s-imports-of-amazon-crude-oil-driving-expansion-of-oil-operations/)


Image above: A pool of oil on May 1, 2009, in Lago Agrio, an Ecuadorean town in the Amazon where Texaco left contamination. Photo by Moises Saman. From (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37891-u-s-imports-of-amazon-crude-oil-driving-expansion-of-oil-operations).
  • Oakland, California-based non-profit Amazon Watch released the report this week to highlight the impacts of oil operations on Amazonian biodiversity and indigenous peoples, as well as on refinery communities in the U.S. and the global climate.
  • U.S. crude imports are in overall decline, the report notes. But imports from the Amazon are on the rise, so much so that the U.S. is now importing more crude oil from the Amazon than from any single foreign country.
  • “Existing and proposed oil and gas blocks in the Amazon cover 283,172 square miles, an area larger than the state of Texas,” per the report.
Crude oil imported to the U.S. from the Amazon, most of which gets refined in California, is driving expansion of oil operations into the rainforest, according to a new report.

Oakland, California-based non-profit Amazon Watch released the report this week to highlight the impacts of oil operations on Amazonian biodiversity and indigenous peoples, as well as on refinery communities in the U.S. and the global climate.

U.S. crude imports are in overall decline, the report notes. But imports from the Amazon are on the rise, so much so that the U.S. is now importing more crude oil from the Amazon than from any single foreign country.

California’s refineries process an average of 170,978 barrels (almost 7.2 million gallons) of those imports every day — representing 74 percent of all Amazon crude imports to the U.S. and roughly 60 percent of total exports from Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

“All commercial and public fleets in California — and many across the U.S. — that buy bulk diesel are using fuel that is at least partially derived from Amazon crude,” Adam Zuckerman, Amazon Watch’s End Amazon Crude Campaign Manager, said in a statement. “Therefore, virtually every company, city, and university in California and around the country contributes to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.”

The opening of new oil drilling concessions represents one of the most severe threats to the western Amazon, the group says. “Existing and proposed oil and gas blocks in the Amazon cover 283,172 square miles, an area larger than the state of Texas,” per the report.

“Oil is presently being extracted from only 7% of these blocks, yet national governments aim to exploit an additional 40%, including those slated for pristine, mega-diverse forests such as Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.”

In the report, Amazon Watch details the “triple carbon impact” of Amazonian oil extraction: carbon emissions are released when the rainforest is cut down to establish drill sites and the necessary roads and other infrastructure, which also means further destruction of the world’s largest carbon sink, and then even more emissions are created when the oil is ultimately burned for energy.

The Amazon plays a crucial role in regulating the global climate and hydrological patterns. The report notes that, therefore, deforestation in the Amazon can be said to contribute to the years-long drought in California, which is having a drastic impact on the state’s agricultural industry and causing massive wildfires.

http://www.islandbreath.org/2016Year/10/161008amazonbig.jpg
Image above: Infographic "End Amazon Crude!" by Amazon Watch. Click to enlarge. From original article.

Of course, the Amazon is also home to the world’s highest levels of biodiversity, with more than 430 mammal species, 1,300 bird species, 56,000 plant and tree species, 5,600 fish species, 1,000 amphibian species, and 2.5 million insect species.

Just one hectare of Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon contains 655 endemic tree species, more than all of the tree species in the United States and Canada combined. “Oil-driven deforestation gravely threatens this complex web of biodiversity, with recent studies linking major, exponential extinctions to forest loss,” the report states.

Esperanza Martínez, president of the Ecuadorian NGO Acción Ecologica, said in a statement that the crude oil that is imported into the U.S. from Ecuador “now carries with it a wave of disasters even greater than previous oil drilling history in the country, since drilling has begun in the Yasuní National Park. Yasuní is home to indigenous communities in voluntary isolation and forests full of immense biodiversity.”

Amazon Watch has also documented the impacts of oil operations on some of the hundreds of indigenous peoples whose traditional territories are in the Amazon. For instance, Peru’s Health Ministry reports that 98 percent of children in the indigenous communities of one oil-producing region of the Peruvian Amazon have high levels of toxic metals in their blood.

 In response, the country’s Environmental Ministry declared four river basins impacted by oil operations “environmental emergencies.”

“If you needed another reason why the time is now to stand up to the oil companies, this remarkable report provides it,” Bill McKibben, noted environmentalist, author, and founder of 350.org, said in a statement. “Ripping apart the Amazon rainforest and indigenous lives rubs salt in the deep climate wound our fossil fuel habit has created.”

McKibben authored an article back in 2012 for Rolling Stone entitled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” in which he wrote that “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn” and argued that as much as 80 percent of the world’s fossil fuel reserves would need to be kept in the ground if we are to avert the worst impacts of runaway climate change.

Just last year, a study published in the journal Nature supported McKibben’s calculations. The authors of the study wrote: “Our results suggest that, globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 per cent of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 in order to meet the target of 2°C.”

Bill McKibben wasn’t the only notable climate activist to highlight the importance of Amazon Watch’s findings.

“Scientific research continues to tell us that we must keep dirty fuels in the ground and continue the transition to 100% clean energy if we want to preserve our communities, protect the health of our families, and tackle the climate crisis,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement. “Putting an end to the destructive use of Amazon crude is a crucial first step in meeting that challenge.”

Amazonian peoples, many of whom consider oil to be the blood of Mother Earth, have long called on governments and corporations to keep it in the ground,” the Amazon Watch report states. “Now scientists are catching up with their calls, stating that we need to keep 80% of fossil fuels in the ground in order to have a good chance of averting catastrophic climate change.

As our planet’s most important carbon sink, the home to over 400 distinct indigenous peoples, and the world’s most biodiverse rainforest, it is urgent that we keep the oil in the ground in the Amazon.”

CITATION
  • McGlade, C., & Ekins, P. (2015). The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2 [deg] C. Nature, 517(7533), 187-190. doi:10.1038/nature14016

Amazon Watch commissioned Pulitzer Prize-winning animator Mark Fiore to create a short animation to accompany the report, which you can watch here:


Video above: Mark Fiore animation "End Amazon Crude!".From (https://youtu.be/v8PKR8vR77Q).

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