Free Range Children

SUBHEAD: Utah just passed America’s first ‘Free-Range Parenting’ law fostering of child self-sufficiency.

By Dominique Mosbergen on 26 March 2018 for Huffington Post -
(https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/utah-free-range-parenting-law_us_5ab8b3dce4b0decad04b91c7)


Image above: Older boy walking younger boy across road with no parental supervision. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: Thank God somewhere children are going to be allowed to be children and discover some of the world on their own. How else can one become a responsible adult and learn how to deal with adversity and challenges. I say down with the Nanny State!]

Utah has legalized a controversial child-rearing method known as “free-range parenting” that encourages the fostering of self-sufficiency in children from a young age, which is believed to be the first legislation of its kind in the United States.

The so-called “free-range kids” bill was signed into law by Republian Gov. Gary Herbert on Friday after the state House and Senate voted unanimously to approve the legislation.

The new law, which will take effect on May 8, specifies that it is not a crime for parents to allow kids who display maturity and good judgment to do things like walk to school alone or play outside without supervision.

An age limit was not defined, but the bill’s sponsors said it was left “purposely open-ended so police and prosecutors can work on a case-by-case basis” if abuse or neglect is suspected, according to The Associated Press.

“If there are clear signs of abuse, obviously that is grounds for action, and in no way is excluded [from the law],” Rep. Brad Daw (R), the bill’s House sponsor, told the Salt Lake Tribune.

Draw said he was convinced to pursue the legislation after seeing cases in other states of parents being investigated or even arrested for allowing their kids to do things alone. A Maryland couple made headlines in 2015 after they were accused of neglect for letting their two children ― aged 10 and 6 ― walk home without adult supervision.

In 2014, a Florida mom was arrested on a felony child neglect charge for allowing her 7-year-old son to walk to a nearby park alone. (That charge was eventually dropped.)

Sen. Lincoln Filmore (R), the Utah bill’s chief sponsor, said he introduced the legislation to encourage more self-reliance among children.

“I feel strongly about the issue because we have become so over-the-top when ‘protecting’ children that we are refusing to let them learn the lessons of self-reliance and problem-solving that they will need to be successful as adults,” Filmore told Yahoo Lifestyle last week.

Advocates of free-range parenting have celebrated Utah’s new law.

“We live in a fear-infused culture in which we’ve lost perspective on safety,” Lenore Skenazy, who coined the term “free-range parenting” about a decade ago, told Yahoo Lifestyle. “Common activities like leaving a child in a car are often presented as though they pose enormous threats to our safety.”

“Yes, anything can happen. But I hate the idea that imagination becomes the basis of law,” she added.

Free-range parenting is a method not without critics, however.

Arkansas tried to pass a similar free-range kids bill last year but failed after receiving pushback from critics who said it was too dangerous to leave children unsupervised.

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Australia ignores climate risks

FSUBHEAD: The country's government  has shirked responsibility to its people's health and future.

By Ian Dunlopon 26 June 2107 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-26/australia-ignores-risks-shirks-moral-responsibility-on-climate/)


Image above: Uncontrolled bushfire in 2015 burns among the hills of Adalaide, Australia. From original article.

The first responsibility of a government is to safeguard the people and their future wellbeing.

The ability to do so is increasingly threatened by human-induced climate change, the accelerating impacts of which are driving political instability and conflict globally. 

 Climate change poses an existential risk to humanity which, unless addressed as an emergency, will have catastrophic consequences.

An existential risk is an adverse outcome that would either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.

In military terms, Australia and the adjacent Asia-Pacific region is considered to be “Disaster Alley”, where the most extreme impacts are already being experienced.

These risks are either not understood or willfully ignored at the leadership level in Australia, which is a profound failure of imagination, far worse than that which triggered the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

The management of existential risk cannot be handled with conventional, reactive, learn-from-failure techniques. We only play this game once, so we must get it right first time.

This should mean an honest, objective look at the real risks to which we are exposed, guarding especially against the more extreme possibilities which would have consequences damaging beyond quantification, and which human civilization as we know it would be lucky to survive.

Instead, the climate and energy policies adopted by successive Australian governments over the last twenty years, largely driven by ideology and corporate fossil fuel interests, have deliberately refused to acknowledge this existential threat to our future well-being, as the shouting match over the wholly inadequate reforms proposed by the Finkel Review demonstrates only too well.

Our leaders have access to the best possible scientific advice and to the overwhelming evidence that we have badly underestimated both the speed and extent of climate change impact.

 In such circumstances, to ignore this threat is a fundamental breach of the fiduciary responsibility with which political, bureaucratic and corporate leaders are entrusted by the community they are supposed to serve.

A hotter planet has already taken us perilously close to, and in some cases over, tipping points which will cause profound changes in major climate systems: at the polar ice-caps, in the oceans, and the large permafrost carbon stores.

Physical impacts of global warming include a hotter and more extreme climate, more frequent and severe droughts, desertification, increasing insecurity of food and water supplies, stronger storms and cyclones, and coastal inundation.

Climate change was a significant factor in triggering the war in Syria, the Mediterranean migrant crisis and the “Arab Spring”, albeit this aspect is rarely discussed.

Our current global carbon emission trajectory, if left unchecked, will drive increasingly severe humanitarian crises, forced migrations, political instability and conflicts.

Australia is not immune, domestically or regionally.

We already have extended heat waves above 40oC, catastrophic bushfires, intense storms and flooding. The regional impacts do not receive much attention but they are striking hard at vulnerable communities in Asia and the Pacific, forcing them into a spiral of dislocation and migration. 

Impacts on China and South Asia will have profound consequences for employment and financial stability in Australia.

In the absence of emergency action to reduce Australian and global emissions far faster than currently proposed, the level of disruption and conflict will escalate to the point that outright regional chaos is likely.

Militarized solutions will not be effective. Australia is failing in its duty to its own people, and as a world citizen, by downplaying these implications and in shirking its responsibility to act.

Yet people understand climate risks, even as political leaders wilfully underplay or ignore them. 84% of 8000 people in eight countries recently surveyed for the Global Challenges Foundation consider climate change a “global catastrophic risk”.

The figure for Australia was 75%. Many people now see climate change as a bigger threat than other concerns such as epidemics, weapons of mass destruction and the rise of artificial intelligence threats.

So what is to be done if our leaders are incapable of rising to the task?

First, establish a high-level climate and conflict task-force in Australia to urgently assess the existential risks of climate change, and develop risk-management techniques and policy appropriate to that challenge.

Second, recognise that climate change is now a global emergency which threatens human civilization, and contribute to building practical steps internationally for a coordinated global emergency response.

Third, launch a domestic emergency initiative to decarbonise the economy no later than 2030 and build the capacity to drawdown carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Fourth, build more resilient communities domestically, and also in the most vulnerable nations regionally by high-level commitments and development assistance; build a flexible capacity to support communities in likely hotspots of instability and conflict; and rethink refugee governance accordingly.

Fifth, ensure that Australia’s defence forces and government agencies are fully aware of and prepared for this changed environment; and ensure their abilities to provide humanitarian aid and disaster relief.

Sixth, establish a national leadership group, outside conventional politics, drawn from across society, charged with implementing the national climate emergency program.

A pious hope in current circumstances? Our leaders clearly do not want the responsibility to secure our future.

So “Everything becomes possible, particularly when it is unavoidable”.

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Trump lets Mattis set troop levels

SUBHEAD: Delegating too much authority to the military does not shield Trump from responsibility for setbacks.

By Phil Stewart & Idrees Ali on 14 June 2017 for Reuters  -
(https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-afghanistan-troops-idUSKBN19431H)


Image above: Trump on tarmac, in front of President's Marine helicopter, with hand on shoulder of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. From (http://ijr.com/2017/06/899016-trump-grants-mattis-authority-set-troop-levels-afghanistan-report/).

U.S. President Donald Trump has given Defense Secretary Jim Mattis the authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan, a U.S. official told Reuters on Tuesday, opening the door for future troop increases requested by the U.S. commander.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said no immediate decision had been made about the troop levels, which are now set at about 8,400. The Pentagon declined to comment.

The decision is similar to one announced in April that applied to U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Syria, and came as Mattis warned Congress the U.S.-backed Afghan forces were not beating the Taliban despite more than 15 years of war.

"We are not winning in Afghanistan right now," Mattis said in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier on Tuesday. "And we will correct this as soon as possible."

Mattis said the Taliban were "surging" at the moment, something he said he intended to address.
A former U.S. official said such a decision might allow the White House to argue that it was not micromanaging as much as the administration of former President Barack Obama was sometimes accused of doing.

Critics say delegating too much authority to the military does not shield Trump from political responsibility during battlefield setbacks and could reduce the chances for diplomats to warn of potential blowback from military decisions.

It has been four months since Army General John Nicholson, who leads U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, said he needed "a few thousand" additional forces, some potentially drawn from U.S. allies.

Current and former U.S. officials say discussions revolve around adding 3,000 to 5,000 troops. Those forces are expected to be largely comprised of trainers to support Afghan forces, as well as air crews.
Deliberations include giving more authority to forces on the ground and taking more aggressive action against Taliban fighters.

Some U.S. officials have questioned the benefit of sending more troops to Afghanistan because any politically palatable number would not be enough to turn the tide, much less create stability and security. To date, more than 2,300 Americans have been killed and more than 17,000 wounded since the war began in 2001.

Any increase of several thousand troops would leave American forces in Afghanistan well below their 2011 peak of more than 100,000 troops.

A truck bomb explosion in Kabul last month killed more than 150 people, making it the deadliest attack in the Afghan capital since the Taliban were ousted in 2001 by a NATO-led coalition after ruling the country for five years.

On Saturday, three U.S. soldiers were killed when an Afghan soldier opened fire on them in eastern Afghanistan.

The broader regional U.S. strategy for Afghanistan remains unclear. Mattis promised on Tuesday to brief lawmakers on a new war strategy by mid-July that is widely expected to call for thousands more U.S. troops.

Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, pressed Mattis on the deteriorating situation during the Tuesday hearing, saying the United States had an urgent need for "a change in strategy, and an increase in resources if we are to turn the situation around."
"We recognize the need for urgency," Mattis said.

The Afghan government was assessed by the U.S. military to control or influence just 59.7 percent of Afghanistan's 407 districts as of Feb. 20, a nearly 11 percentage-point decrease from the same time in 2016, according to data released by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.



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Learning what to make of it

SUBHEAD: I begin to make restitution, to walk the walk after so many years of talking the talk.

By Paul Kingsnorth on 24 May 2017 for Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/learning-what-to-make-of-it/)


Image above: "Small Holding" photograph from original article.

When we win, it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
– Rilke

Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.
– Ian Hamilton Finlay

The most exciting thing in my life at the moment is a five gallon bucket full of human excrement.

I should explain.

I recently tore the flush toilet out of our family home and replaced it with a compost toilet which I built myself. It is of the most basic variety: essentially, we crap into a big bucket and cover the crap with sawdust, then when the bucket is full I empty the contents onto a compost heap, where it rots down over the course of a year.

At the end of that year, we should have a safe and nutritious compost to use on our fruit trees and bushes, on the fuel coppices of aspen and birch we’ll be planting this winter, and on the small native forest that we are planning to grow here for as long as we are healthy.

It’s a big job, something like this, and undertaking it has made me realize how much effort needs to be put into the most simple things, and that in turn has made me realize why the society I live in has become addicted to paying for complicated things instead, and how this has laid a great big elephant trap for us that we may struggle ever to get out of.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first thing I did was to build a rectangular box out of planks and nails, and the remains of two kitchen cupboard doors which we didn’t need any more. There followed a lot of sanding and planing and painting and varnishing and swearing when things were the wrong length and hinges didn’t fit where they should have done.

This took a few weeks, on and off, but at the end of it I had quite a handsome varnished wooden structure with two shiny blue hinged covers and a toilet seat on top. A five gallon brewing bucket fitted underneath.

Then I had to build a compost heap: two, in fact, so that we could keep an annual cycle of compost from the toilet going. I bought some old pallets from the timber yard up the road and carted them home in my van. That was a couple of days’ work.

After I had finished, I stood back and admired them for about half an hour. I am a writer. I have never been a practical man, or have never believed I am, and I’m still at the stage where successfully completing a practical task fills me with astonishment.

Still, that was the easy bit. Ever tried taking out a flush toilet? It’s a messy job. In the end, a friend came round and devoted an afternoon to helping me to do it. He is a casually practical man, so the job went well. In the aftermath, big chunks of porcelain lay on the grass outside and all that remained in the bathroom was a blocked up outflow pipe and a gash in the lino. In went the compost loo, in went a bucket of sawdust, in went a wall hanging to cover the gaping holes, and voilà: a closed loop system.

The flush toilet, to me, is a worthy metaphor for the civilization I live in. It is convenient, it is easy, it is hygienic and it is wonderfully warm and dry. It is the most luxurious pooing experience known to man. You can do your business and never have to think about what happens next: never have to think about what happens to the feces and urine you have just produced, just as you probably never thought about the origins of the food which created it in the first place.

You can act, if you like, as if you have never produced it at all; as if you were far too civilised to have to engage in such base and primitive behavior. You can sit in the warmth, reading an amusing light-hearted book, then you can simply press a button, and you will never have to deal with your own shit.

What happens to a society that won’t deal with its own shit? It ends up deep in it.

A compost toilet is harder work. First you have to build the toilet and the compost heaps, and then you have to source a regular supply of sawdust or pine needles, which will keep the smells and flies away and give the compost enough bulk on the heap.

Most importantly, you have to empty the bucket when it gets full, which is every few days most of the time. This is the part of the job which really seems to disgust those of my friends and family who can’t understand why I have disposed of a perfectly good toilet and replaced it with something medieval.

But it’s also the part of the job that I enjoy the most. I’ve noticed myself getting almost excited as the bucket approaches being full. Emptying the thing on to the compost heap, covering it with grass, inspecting the progress of the heap so far, cleaning and replacing the bucket, putting a new layer of sawdust in the bottom: would you believe me if I told you this was a satisfying process? Anticipating being able to use the results on my own trees is almost thrilling.

If a flush toilet is a metaphor for a civilization that wants to wash its hands of its own wastes as long as they accumulate somewhere else, then a compost toilet is both a small restitution, and a declaration:

• I will not turn my back on the consequences of my actions. 
• I will not hand them over to someone else to deal with. 
• I will not crap into clean drinking water and flush it down a pipe to be cleaned with industrial chemicals at some sewage plant I have never visited.

I will fertilize my own ground with my own manure, and in doing so I will control an important part of my life in this world, and that control will give me more understanding over it. I will claw something of myself back. Even in the rain, even in winter, I will deal with my own shit.

---

In 2014, I emigrated. My wife and I moved with our two young children from urban England, where we had always lived, to rural Ireland. We bought ourselves a small bungalow with two and a half acres of land up a quiet lane. It was the culmination of a personal project we’ve been engaged in for more than half a decade: to find a way escape from the urban consumer machine we were both brought up in.

We wanted to live more simply; or perhaps just more starkly, because life here is rarely simple. Our kids were just getting to school age, and the idea of sending them to school to systematically crush their spontaneity and have them taught computer coding so that they could compete in the ‘global race’ made us miserable. We wanted to grow our own food and compost our own shit and educate our own children and make our own jam and take responsibility for our own actions.

This can all sound very cloying. Western middle class people going ‘back to the land’ is a modern cliché, and when we think we are hearing that story we tend to react in a particular way, positive or negative depending on our political or cultural persuasions.

Perhaps I am a cliché, but I’m not especially interested in other people’s expectations. I was brought here by many things, but one of them is a voice that has been whispering in my ear for years, and growing louder for the last few.

This voice tells me that I am one of the luckiest people on Earth. It tells me I am a middle-class man from a country grown fat on centuries of plunder, that I have a university degree, that I go to restaurants and have a laptop computer and an internet connection, and I can publish articles like this in magazines.

In other words, I am somewhere up near the top of the pyramid of human fortune. And that in turn means I am up near the top of the pyramid of human cupidity and destruction which is driving the natural world to the edge.

One of the driving forces in my life is a deep love of nature. If you ask me to explain precisely what I mean by that, or why it has such a grip on me, I won’t be able to. But I could tell you about profound experiences I’ve had in forests and mountains, about the joy that rises in my heart when I see a hawk circle or hear the roar of an untamed river, and the misery that sinks into it if I’m trapped in a city or on a motorway.

I could tell you about the occasional brief glimpses I get into the reality that I am a passing moment in an ancient, beautiful, terrifying whorl of life on a vast unknowable planet; that I am not an observer of it, but a part of its wide flow; that there is no such thing as outside.

This kind of thing is nearly impossible to put down on paper, as you can see. Once upon a time, many millennia ago, I suspect it would have been the default worldview, but today, it is a hard one to live with. The culture that I was born into is systematically dismantling the web of life itself, and as it does so it is dismantling my sense of meaning and many of the things that I love.

My status as a middle-class consumer in a Western industrialised country means that I am part of this problem, whether I want to face up to that or not.

This is what that voice whispered to me, as once it whispered to Rilke: you must change your life. I came here because I can’t justify my complicity any more. I feel a personal duty to live as simply and with as little impact on the rest of nature as I possibly can.

I’ve no interest in extending this duty to anybody else, or in preaching about it or politicising it, or in pretending that I am in any way pure or unsullied or even halfway competent yet at undertaking it. It is just a personal calling.

But perhaps it explains my joy at that full toilet bucket. I feel I am at last starting to do my bit, to make restitution, to walk the walk after so many years of talking the talk. I can’t write or talk about natural beauty, or natural anything, unless I’m trying to do as little damage to it as possible; and at this time in history, that means taking myself away from the heart of the beast. It means stripping back.

It means inconveniencing myself. It means paying attention.

• Dark Mountain co-founder Paul Kingsnorth’s new essay collection, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, was published last month by Faber. It brings together 18 of Paul’s essays from the past decade, along with Uncivilisation, the original manifesto that got the Dark Mountain Project started. This is an excerpt from one of the essays in the book, ‘Learning What to Make of It’ 

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The World at 1°C — March ‘17

SUBHEAD: People need to see the upside of climate-friendly policies leading to useful work and health.


By Staff on 31 March 2017 for Demand Climate Justice -
(https://medium.com/@DemandClimateJustice/the-world-at-1c-march-2017-15ada0bb5ba6)


Image above: The Bogus Creek Fire burns in Alaska, 2015. Photo Credit: US Department of Agriculture. From original article.

“We are at the crossroads now: We either say: this thing is too big for us, this task cannot be done. Then we will be transformed by nature, because we will end up with a planet warming by 4, 5, 6 or even 12 degrees. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and I have all the evidence. Or we say: We’re doing the transformation ourselves.” — Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, climate scientist, Postdam Institute.

The Global Threat
One of the many facets of humanity threatened by climate change is language itself, our ability to construct narrative to make sense of the world around us. How does a collection of words capture what confounds the limits of human imagination? How do you thread together a story about the unweaving of life?

These are questions we struggle to answer every day, but the bitter, impossibly incomplete summary we have right now is:

• We are killing each other. 
• We are extinguishing the conditions necessary for the dignified survival of the human species.

The changes being unleashed, as well as the changes we are failing to make — the blind spots we are continuing to hold — are relegating lands and lives to the abyss.

This month has brought into better clarity the incomprehensible numeracy of the scars we are carving into the planet. The rates of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are close to breaching the 410 ppm threshold. The last time levels were this high was the Pliocene Epoch, 3 million years ago.

This matters because during the Pliocene, sea levels were between 15–25 meters higher than today. The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was consistently above 400 ppm was 16 million years ago during the Miocene, or about 25 million years ago during the early Oligocene, when the Earth was unrecognisable compared to anything homo sapiens have ever experienced.

The Arctic today has record low ice levels: in late winter it has about as much ice as it had midsummer 35 years ago. This is deeply worrying, as previous research has shown that Arctic ice melt could catalyze uncontrollable climate change.

New research has lent further weight to the claim that global warming is going to alter the jet stream, making it weaker and more prolonged — the result of which is that weather patterns may persist for longer, driving extreme droughts, heat waves, and storms. In fact, analysis shows that a “human fingerprint” can now be found over nearly all extreme weather events.

Such rapid changes are exacting a profound psychic toll the world over. Iowan farmer Matthew Russell, whose family has tended to their land for five generations, recounts:

“Psychologically, in the last few years, there’s a lot of anxiety that I don’t remember having 10 years ago. In the last three or four years, there’s this tremendous anxiety around the weather because windows of time for quality crop growth are very narrow.”

The World Meteorological Organisation’s State of the Climate report for 2016 shows a planet heading into “truly uncharted territory”, defined by tumbling temperature records, heatwaves, and glacial melting. Jeffrey Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona commented:

“Earth is a planet in upheaval due to human-caused changes in the atmosphere. In general, drastically changing conditions do not help civilisation, which thrives on stability.”

Ensuring that stability will be no easy feat. Scientists have come up with a daunting roadmap for meeting the Paris Agreement goals, and achieving decarbonisation by 2050: global CO2 emissions will need to halve every decade. Net emissions from land use (agriculture, forestry) will have to dive to zero.

Carbon dioxide removal technologies — those that suck carbon from the atmosphere — will need to scale up massively to the extent that they will have to pull 5 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere (double what soil and trees do already).

We are nowhere near this level of action; instead, we’re seeing the highest rates of CO2 growth on record. The human and non-human cost of all this is harrowing.

Species in every ecosystem are being affected by increasing temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns. Marine animals are moving towards the poles at the average rate of 72 kilometres a decade.

A new study has shown that India’s dwindling groundwater is tied to variable monsoon precipitation, linked to climate change. The result has been the worst drought in a century across Southern India, where dozens of farmers have committed suicide following crop losses and financial difficulties in wake of the drought, and communities have been forced to eat rats due to food shortages.

“This is not a crime against humanity. This is a crime by humanity. We have sentenced to death the largest living structure on the planet: the Great Barrier Reef. The sentence is being carried out slowly and painfully before our eyes.”

To make matters even worse, the reef was further devastated by a powerful cyclone, which turned parts of the reef into an “underwater wasteland”.

New data is sharpening scientific fears that the Middle East and North Africa risks becoming uninhabitable in a few decades, as the availability of fresh water has fallen by two-thirds over the past 40 years. This research comes as evidence signals that nutrition and food security levels in the region have deteriorated sharply over the last six years.

In Zimbabwe, floods have caused a spike in malaria cases. In Russia, scientists have identified 7000 large gas bubbles across the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas that are about to explode. The air already emanating from these bubbles includes 20 times more carbon dioxide and 200 times more methane than nearby air.

This phenomenon is being linked to climate change, as permafrost across Siberia is rapidly melting, releasing a build-up of methane and greenhouse gases.

In Brazil, five years after the country adopted a new Forest Code, deforestation is now 60% higher. The Amazon is facing a vicious cycle of drought and forest loss, with irreparable damage being wrought by deforestation in Paraguay’s Chaco region, yet the Brazilian government is continuing to hand it over to mining and agribusiness.

Other governments maintain this suicidal ideology as well, with the Australian government changing Native Title law to make it easier for mining companies to secure access to land.

In the US, Trump’s effort to “Make America Dirty Again” continues at full place, as even the minimal climate change regulation introduced by Obama as part of his “legacy” are rapidly being rolled back.

However, the Trump administration is not just content with attacking environmental law, it is also attacking the very basis of reality, scrubbing climate science itself from the public domain. Already, 8 major oil and gas projects are in the works in the United States

While the US’ great rival China may be reducing coal use at home, it is boosting it abroad, kickstarting a new coal boom in Pakistan. Veteran environmentalist William Laurance wrote, 

“Across the globe, on nearly every continent, China is involved in a dizzying variety of resource extraction, energy, agricultural, and infrastructure projects — roads, railroads, hydropower dams, mines — that are wreaking unprecedented damage to ecosystems and biodiversity. This onslaught will likely be made easier by the Trump administration’s anti-environmental tack and growing disengagement internationally.”

 Dirty development affects China profoundly, with some of its most precious rivers being polluted to astonishing levels — threatening local livelihoods which depend on tourism.

March was a month of dramatic drought and deluge. Peru and Namibia suffered the worst floods in recent memory. In Peru, more than half the country declared a state of emergency. 100 bridges and 11,000 homes have collapsed, 78 people have died, 20 have disappeared, and 263 are wounded.

The poorest have been the worst hit, with entire slums washed away. These events take place just months after Peru experienced severe drought and record wildfires. Peru’s floods and torrential rains followed spikes of ocean surface temperature off the Peruvian coast earlier in March. The floods afflicting Peru raise alarm bells for the rest of the region.


Image above: Water distribution during 2011 Somalian drought. Photo credit Oxfam. From original article.

On the other side of the world in East Africa, drought continues, with international aid officials saying they are facing one of the biggest humanitarian disasters since World War II.

We are now likely to face an unprecedented situation: four simultaneous famines happening in four countries. Countless lives are at stake, with an estimated 20 million people — including 1.4 million children — already suffering from malnutrition. Though famine is a consequence of politics and economics, scientists have in this case identified climate change as partly responsible.

Without significant efforts, the drought shows little sign of relenting. Researchers are predicting a 3rd “poor or failed crop growing season for Eastern Kenya and Somalia” for March — May. This poor cropping forecast is linked to reduced rainfall, which in turn is partially driven by sea-surface temperatures in the western Pacific and central Pacific.

However, research into climate change impacts in Africa remains stinted by unconscious biases which mean that certain countries are favored as case studies far more than others in what is known as “the streetlight effect.”

Meanwhile in Asia water politics are near “boiling point”, as prolonged water scarcity increases the risk of cascading conflicts between countries and communities. In Bangladesh, over eight million people are losing access to freshwater as climate change makes rivers too saline for farming. Even Europe is thirsty and parched: 80% of Spain risks becoming a desert this century.

The problem is global: in the Argentine province of Salta temperatures surpassed 40C, fuelling water scarcity and killing 26 people in 23 days. Cape Town is also experiencing tremendous drought.

A UNICEF report has warned than 1 in 4 children around the world will face extreme water scarcity by 2040. This scarcity will bring greater environmental vulnerability to children; currently, a fourth of all deaths of children under five are due to environmental risks such as air pollution and unclean water.

Extreme weather has wiped out an enormous Australian mangrove forest stretching over 1000 kilometres. For a rich country like Australia, such weather events are traumatic shocks. For poorer countries, they are crippling: Dominica is still struggling to recover from the effects of Tropical Storm Erika (2015). When the storm hit, the country’s Prime Minister warned that it would take the country’s development back by twenty years.

For some places, even a slow recovery from the impacts of global warming won’t be an option. In Bangladesh, the shrinking Sagar Island in the Sundarbans is struggling to stay afloat. In Costa Rica, some coastal towns are looking at the prospect of being wiped out by sea level rise in the near future.

Worldwide, this will lead to a massive displacement and relocation of peoples. Already 1.3 million people have been relocated away from their coastal homes as part of “managed retreat” programmes. This month, the entire community Colombian municpality of Murindó will now have to be relocated after torrential rains.

The evidence of today’s impacts supports the claims that there is an urgent and growing need to improve climate finance, and to make the world economy carbon-free by 2050, at the latest.

Victories, Solutions and Hope

In spite of the visceral despair, hope always holds up the horizon. Whether we are talking about the proud resistance struggles of communities around the world, or about people enacting their own solutions, one thing that has to be said is that there are many people around the world who are not going to see it be destroyed without a fight.

For example, community activists in Western Australia have finally won their campaign to stop construction of a road which would have eliminated the Beeliar wetlands sacred to the Noongar people, with the latest state election.

On the other side of the country, over a dozen groups have banded together to stop the Adani coal mine, while in the Northern Territory aboriginal peoples are blocking a monster gas pipeline from passing through their lands.

A First Nations Renewable Energy Alliance has formed to tackle energy poverty and dirty energy — something which First Nations groups in Canada have also done. The state of Victoria passed a permanent ban on fracking.

In China the government has banned commercial logging in natural forests, and will replace 90% of coal power with clean energy in Hebei province, while in Liberia, citizens are putting pressure on lawmakers to pass a land rights act. In India, the government is aiming for 100% electric vehicles by 2030.

In Europe, eminent universities such as King’s College London and the University of Bristol have agreed to divest from fossil fuels. City leaders such as Stockholm mayor Karin Wanngård are driving forward potent agendas rooted in sustainability. Cities, less beholden to fossil fuel interests, are at the forefront of ambitious climate policies.

European companies are planning to build an “energy island” in the North Sea, that will provide affordable wind power to tens of millions. In Germany, an old coal mine is being converted into a giant storage system for excess solar and wind energy. In Canada, an old hard-rock mine is now British Columbia’s largest solar farm.

From the United States to South Africa to the Netherlands, climate justice battles are increasingly being fought and won in court.

Manipuri women are demanding recognition for their role as peacebuilders and nature protectors. Macedonian groups are resisting destructive copper mining in the south-east of the country, while Croatian movements organized a major Critical Mass action in Zagreb to demand an just transition away from fossil fuels.

Shuar communities in Ecuador are continuing to resist a Chinese copper mining project. Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Cinta Larga are continuing to challenge diamond mining.

The Kichwa people of Sarayaku remain a beacon of hope for the world in their fierce resistance against oil drilling in their ancestral homelands. In Guyana, Wai-Wai communities are using mobile technology to protect their lands and forests.

In a landslide electoral victory, residents of the central Colombian town of Cajamarca voted down the world’s largest open-pit gold mining project: la Colosa. It was a triumph of the needs of life over luxury, as 45% of global gold is used for gold bars and 47% for jewellery.

This victory also exemplifies the growing use of municipal referenda to oppose extractive projects across the Americas. In El Salvador, several local referenda against mining projects have brought forward a national bill that would ban mining for metals in the country.

The bill has been passed with overwhelming congressional support, a historic victory. In another victory, the World Bank exited the controversial Angostura goldmine project in Colombia’s Santurban moorlands.

In the northern Argentine province of Jujuy, communities have marched for over a week to protest and visibilize their struggle against mining. Communities in Southern Mexico are stepping up to protect the disappearing forests of the Lacandon jungle, and in Baja, California, movements have been successful in stopping the Los Cardones open cast mining project. In Panama, flooded Ngäbe communities are continuing to fight the Barro Blanco dam.

From redesigning money to better reflect different degrees of value, to climate-smart agriculture in the Caribbean, to use ancient Nubian low-carbon construction techniques, improving forest management, there is no shortage of solutions. Or of areas to implement them.

According to studies by Google, almost 90 per cent of US rooftops are suitable for solar power.

However it is not just limiting climate change that requires urgent attention — building capacity to deal with it is also crucial, which is why it is important that the Jamaican government has approved major projects to improve the country’s resilience and adaptation to climate change.

The very way in which modern civilization relates to nature seems to be changing: the high court of the Indian state of Uttarakhand declared the Ganga and Yamuna rivers to be living entities, giving them legal rights. In New Zealand, after 140 years of negotiation, a Māori tribe won legal recognition for Whanganui river, meaning it must be treated as a living entity.

Even in the seemingly hopeless United States of America, there are some good news stories: the state of Maryland banned fracking, and on the Hudson river small towns are fighting Big Oil.

Movements are building their power by reframing environmental solutions as mechanisms that can make a short-term and long-term difference to people’s lives us. As Kumar Venkat writes,

“We must steer the debate towards how climate change mitigation can provide tangible co-benefits in other domains. People need to see the upside of climate-friendly policies, while knowing that any costs will be shared broadly by society. Among the issues that matter…on a daily basis, health and employment should be front and center while tackling climate change.”

Obituaries & Recognition
Cruelly, many environment and land defenders — many indigenous and many women — remain at risk for their noble actions.

This month in Mexico journalist Miroslava Breach — who covered illegal logging and killing in Indigenous territories — was murdered.

In Colombia, social leaders from Congreso de los Pueblos, which is heavily involved in agrarian action, were detained by the army while agroecologist and human rights defender Ruth Alicia Lopez Guisao was shot dead by two unidentified gunmen in Medellín. Brazilian land rights defender Waldomiro Costa Pereira was also murdered.

This month also marked the first anniversary of the murder of Berta Cáceres — we remember her gracious spirit, dignity and force.

Elsewhere in Latin America the risks are also high: in Guatemala, human rights defenders have denounced attacks by large dam operators, while in Honduras Suyapa Martínez of the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer was subject to judicial harassment by the company Desarrollo Energético S.A. which stands accused of the murder of Berta Cáceres.

The violence inflicted on such brave activists should inspire us to hold up, support, and be inspired by those people around us who are fighting the good fights.

Some good souls we wanted to highlight this month include:

Alicia Cawiya, an Indigenous activist prepared to defy the powerful to save Ecuador’s Yasuní rainforest; 

Ridhima Pandey, a 9-year old in India who is bringing a plea to the National Green Tribunal alleging inaction on climate change;

Sergei Kechimov, an Indigenous Khanty reindeer herder in Siberia who is confronting oil giants; and

Antonio Vicente, an 84-year old Brazilian who has planted 50,000 trees over the past 40 years in an attempt to fight deforestation. To them and the countless others fighting to make the world a better place to live, we give our sincerest thanks.

And to all of you we say: hold on to your hope. We are only as big as the challenge we choose to take on.
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The blood on my hands

SUBHEAD: Just because we don't pull the trigger we are all culpable in the killing that our lifestyle requires.

By Brian Miller on 9 August 2015 for Winged Elm Farm -
(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2015/08/09/the-blood-on-my-hands/)


Image above: Painting of  "Duck Hunters On The Hoboken Marshes" by William Tylee Ranney, 1849, Boston Museum of Fine arts. From (http://americanartgallery.org/artist/details/view/sshow/id/458).

I laid out my shotguns and deer rifle on a folding table outside the kitchen window. With fall around the corner, it was time to clean and oil the guns. It’s a methodical process that is satisfying to undertake on objects that are a beautiful marriage of design and utility.

Using a kit made for the purpose, I rammed the cleaning rods through the barrels, oiled the working parts, and rubbed the wood stocks till they shone. I finished just as guests arrived for dinner, returning the guns to the cabinet as they walked up the drive.

Growing up in Louisiana I, alongside my father and brother, hunted and fished year round. It was a rare week that did not find me crouching in a duck blind, running trot lines, crabbing, or catching crawfish.

Game, fresh- and saltwater fish, shrimp, and oysters easily provided five dinner meals out of seven for our household. Staying up late at night cleaning and gutting fish, setting the alarm every two hours to run the trot-line, waking up at 3 a.m. to get to the duck blind or be on the open gulf by sunrise, all were part of the landscape of my childhood.

Mine was the hunting and fishing of providence, not of the trophy hunter. It was the experience of a profoundly masculine world. From the catching, shooting, and cleaning to, in many cases, the cooking, it was a culture of men putting food on the table for their families.

It wasn’t needed in the middle class home of my father—he certainly could have provided all of our meat needs from the grocery store—but it was a lifestyle I shared with most of my friends growing up.

There was always an exhilaration in making a good shot or setting the hook on a large fish. It provided, and still does, a sense of accomplishment that is part evolutionary and large part tribal.

The camaraderie of men in camp, the solitude of the hunt, being on the water by myself, or with my father, the rituals of killing and of eating, each shaped who I am as a person.

Perhaps it is counterintuitive, but killing another living creature can teach a person a lot about nature. Putting that act of killing in its “proper place” reminds us of where we came from and where we belong. And remembering our place in a natural order may be the best way to save this planet.

A detractor could argue against the killing, the male role in that culture, and I would listen and perhaps agree in part. But my defense is simple and straightforward: I prefer to be the one with blood on his hands. I believe it is a stance that makes me more, not less, sensitive to the value of life. It is the same reason I butcher poultry and livestock. It seems more honest.

Some may be shaking their heads right now. But as we collectively pile into our cars, while away our hours shopping, allow our kids to grow up without seeing the light of day as they game their way into perpetual adolescence, move from air-conditioned office to air-conditioned vehicle to air-conditioned home, with all that those actions entail to the planet, we might ask ourselves a hard question: who are we kidding?

Whether vegetarian or meat eater, just because we do not pull the trigger or set the hook, we are all culpable in the killing that our lifestyle requires.

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