Animations for the theme World Overpopulation as introduced in May Newsletter

Well, first of all, to lower the heart-rate of U.S. readers, we should state that they clearly did not mean that they were aware of a secret global government to which they had sworn loyalty until the Dark Side crushes all light from the Force, or until Mom, apple pie, and sacred national sovereignty expire in the satanic flames of Internationalism. How do I know this? Well, for one thing, something that a majority of the planet is aware of is the opposite of a secret. But, more importantly, what's at issue here is the poll respondents' attitude, not their situation. In many nations, the responses were almost evenly split; half the people weren't wrong, they were just differently minded.

Still, what did they mean?

In the United States, rather stunningly, 22 percent of respondents supposedly said they strongly agreed that they saw themselves more as a global citizen, while another 21 percent somewhat agreed. How you can somewhat agree with a binary choice I haven't the foggiest idea, but supposedly they did. That's 43 percent total agreeing either strongly or somewhat in the land of flag-waving militarized exceptionalism, if you can believe it -- or if it doesn't actually mean much.

Canada is slightly higher at 53 percent. But what does it mean? Were respondents shocked into agreement with a sensible sounding idea they'd never heard mentioned before? Is a strong minority really enlightened beyond the common nationalism? Russia, Germany, Chile, and Mexico had the least identification as global citizens. Should we look down on that? Nigeria, China, Peru, and India had the highest. Should we emulate that? Are people identifying with humanity or against their country or in support of their own desire to emigrate, or against the desires of others to immigrate? Or are people employed by globalized capital actually turning against nationalism?

I've always thought that if people would stop speaking in the first person about the crimes of their country's military, and start identifying with all of humanity, we might achieve peace. So I compared the "global citizen" results with the results of a 2014 poll that asked if people would be willing to fight in a war for their country. The results of that poll were also stunningly encouraging, with strong majorities in many countries saying they would not fight in a war. But there does not appear to be a correlation between the two polls. Unless we can find a way to correct for other important factors, it does not seem that being a global citizen and refusing to fight have anything consistently in common. Nationalistic countries are and are not willing to fight in wars. "Global citizen" countries are and are not willing to fight in wars.

Of course, the willingness to fight responses are sheer nonsense. The United States has numerous wars up and running, recruitment offices in most towns, and 44% of the country saying it "would" fight if there were a war. (What's stopping them?) And, again, the global citizen responses may be largely nonsense too. Still, Canada does roughly as much better than the United States in each of the two polls. Perhaps they make the sort of sense I'm looking for but only in North America. Asian nations, however, are both biggest on global citizenship and most willing to participate in wars (or to make that claim to a pollster).

Whatever it may mean, I take it to be wonderful news that a majority of humanity identifies with the world. It's up to us to now make it mean what it should. We need to develop a belief in world citizenship that begins by recognizing every other human on earth, and other living things in their own way, as sharing in it. A citizen of the globe does not expect to necessarily have much in common with the inhabitants of some far-off corner of the earth, but does certainly understand that no war can be waged against fellow citizens.

We don't need clean elections or an end to war profits or the expansion of the ICC to impose the rule of law on countries outside of Africa in order to create world citizenship. We just need our own minds. And if we get it right in our own minds, all of those other things had better get ready to happen.

So how do we think like world citizens? Try this. Read an article about a distant place. Think: "That happened to some of us." By "us" mean humanity. Read an article about peace activists protesting war who say aloud "We are bombing innocent people," identifying themselves with the U.S. military. Work at it until you can find such statements incomprehensible. Search online for articles mentioning "enemy." Correct them to reflect the fact that everyone has the same enemies: war, environmental destruction, disease, starvation. Search for "them" and "those people" and change it to us and we humans.

This is in fact a massive project, but apparently there are millions of us already identifying with it, and many hands make light work.

Another impressive set of data: the net reproduction rates in Japan remained around or below the replacement rate during the Edo period, keeping the population constant for, indeed, something like one century and a half. It is also impressive to note how the reproduction rate literally exploded afterward, bringing the Japanese population from the ca. 25 millions of the Edo period to the present level of around 125 million, five times larger. Note also how rapidly the reproduction rate collapsed after the 1950s; it is a stark example of what we call the "demographic transition."

The Pentagon announced Saturday that it was filing a formal complaint with the Russian Defense Ministry and US Secretary of State John Kerry threatened retaliatory action after two incidents involving US and Russian forces in the Baltic Sea.

The Pentagon alleged that a Russian SU-27 fighter jet flew within 50 feet of a US reconnaissance plane in international airspace on April 14, and that a Russian jet and helicopter “buzzed” the Navy destroyer USS Donald Cook as it was conducting military exercises with Poland in the Baltic two days earlier.

The two incidents demonstrate once again that Washington’s aggressive military build-up throughout Eastern Europe, in close collaboration with its NATO allies, has brought the entire region to the brink of war between nuclear powers. The Obama administration seized on the Ukraine crisis provoked by a Western-sponsored coup in Kiev in 2014 to massively expand its military presence in Eastern Europe, so as to encircle and isolate Russia in a region stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea.

While the intensification of US military operations on Russian borders represents an act of aggression, the latest incident also demonstrates the bankruptcy of Moscow’s response. The Kremlin oligarchy, which came to power by plundering state resources in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is resorting to a military build-up and the encouragement of reactionary Russian nationalism. Conditions are so tense that a miscalculation by either side or even an accident could serve as the trigger for a conflict that could quickly escalate to include the use of nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Kerry admitted as much this past week, when he responded to the USS Donald Cook incident by bluntly declaring that the US would have been within its rights to shoot the Russian jet down. Washington’s top diplomat labeled the alleged behavior of the jet as “reckless” and “provocative,” while the Pentagon called Thursday’s interception of the spy plane as an “erratic and aggressive” act.

Moscow denied the allegations, claiming in a statement that in the case of the spy plane, the Russian Air Force had “detected over the Baltic ocean an unidentified aerial target rapidly approaching the Russian border.” Spokesman Igor Konashenkov stated that the actions of the Russian aircraft were “in accordance with international standards for the use of air space.”

Confrontations between NATO and Russian aircraft over the Baltic are becoming routine. According to a January report from United Press International, NATO jets scrambled at least 160 times in 2015 to intercept Russian jets in the Baltic. This figure was a 14 percent rise from 2014.

The pace of such incidents is likely to rise dramatically in the immediate period ahead. The Obama administration has announced a quadrupling of defense spending for Europe for 2017 to $3.4 billion. The increase will finance the sending of an additional three brigades. A further 16,500 soldiers will be in permanent rotation throughout Eastern Europe, from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—to whom Obama in September 2014 issued a guarantee of US support in the event of conflict with Russia—to Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the Black Sea states of Romania and Bulgaria.

In this, Washington is aligning itself with virulently right-wing, anti-Russian regimes whose reckless policies could provide the spark that ignites the ongoing standoff.

In comments to the Globsec security forum on the weekend, Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski proclaimed Russia to be a greater threat to world peace than the Islamic State. He urged NATO to permanently deploy troops to Poland to protect its eastern border, vowing that he would make an appeal to that end at the NATO summit scheduled to take place in Warsaw in July. “By all evidence, Russia’s activity is a sort of existential threat because this activity can destroy countries,” Waszczykowski asserted.

Romania, another NATO member, is pushing for the Warsaw summit to adopt a plan for a permanent NATO naval presence in the Black Sea. Romania’s defense minister, Mihnea Motoc, said earlier this month on a visit to Georgia that he would be in favor of an enhanced partnership between NATO members Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey and would-be members Georgia and Ukraine to establish a Black Sea fleet. Motoc said in an interview that the proposed fleet would be open “to NATO members who don’t border the Black Sea, yet are constantly present in Black Sea ports and take part in exercises—first of all, to the United States.”

At the NATO summit in Wales in September 2014, the alliance committed to have all members spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on their militaries, and agreed the creation of a rapid response force for eastern Europe that has since been expanded to enable tens of thousands of troops to be deployed anywhere within the alliance’s territory in a matter of days.

The lead article in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times underscored the fact that potential conflicts for which such forces are being prepared would likely involve the deployment of nuclear weapons. In what it described as a revival of the Cold War, the Times described Washington, Russia and China as being engaged in an arms race to develop a new class of small-scale nuclear weapons with capabilities to bypass traditional missile defense shields.

There is an objective significance to the fact that the Times, America’s “newspaper of record,” has published a front-page article bringing to light a development that has long been the subject of in-depth analysis by US think tanks. A report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments published earlier this year was entitled Rethinking Armageddon: scenario planning in the second nuclear age, reflecting the fact that policymaking circles are considering the practicalities of how to fight and win a military conflict with nuclear weapons.

Since President Obama’s 2010 promise not to pursue new nuclear weapons programs, Washington has announced an additional $1 trillion in funding for the modernization of the US nuclear arsenal. The Times article provides information on the types of weaponry being developed, including a new weapon called a hypersonic glide vehicle. Such weapons, which the US will begin flight-testing next year, could “render missile defenses all but useless,” the Times noted.

At the conclusion of the biennial nuclear summit in Washington at the end of last month, to which Russia refused to send representatives, Obama expressed concern about “ramping up new and more deadly and more effective systems that end up leading to a whole new escalation of the arms race.”

A second Times article published over the weekend on the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad makes all too clear that the plans for the deployment of nuclear weapons have moved well beyond the realm of speculation. The Russian territory, located on the southeast corner of the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland, was described in testimony to Congress by NATO Commander Gen. Phillip Breedlove in February as a “very militarized piece of property” that was “capable of repelling attacks by air, land or sea.”

The six years since Obama’s empty pledge to reduce nuclear weapons have seen a vast intensification of US-led aggressive military operations aimed at consolidating American hegemony and weakening Russia and China in key geostrategic regions. As part of the ongoing bombardment of Iraq and Syria, carried out under the pretext of combating terrorism, Washington recently sent nuclear-capable B52 bombers to its Middle East bases, bringing them well within range of Iran and Russia itself.

The lyrics of a popular song repeat a message of comforting (but irresponsible) fatalism: “Que Sera Sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see. Que Sera Sera. What will be will be.”

I strongly believe that we must not allow ourselves the luxury of fatalism, especially today, when our future is darkened by the twin threats of catastrophic climate change and thermonuclear war.

We must accept our responsibility for both the near future and the distant future. We must do all that is within our power to make our world one in which our children and their descendants can survive. We must save the environment. We must save plants and animals from extinction.

What has happened to the global environment is a human creation. Its very name, the anthhropocene, indicates that we made it. What will happen in the future will also be our creation, the sum of the choices that we make.

War is a human creation. Just as we abolished slavery, we can also abolish the institution of war. It is our responsibility to do so.

The tribal tendencies of human nature are not inevitable. Racism is not inevitable. Nationalist Chauvanism is not inevitable. The dark side of human nature can be overwritten by education and ethics. It is our responsibility to create a global ethical system that matches our advanced technology. We must create an ethic of universal human solidarity.

Global anarchy is not inevitable. We can extend the methods used to avoid war within nations to the entire world. We can reform the United Nations and create a global federation capable of effectively achieving the goals that we desire.

Our economic system is a human creation. The laws of the market are not really laws: They are choices. If we choose we could maximize human happiness, rather than maximizing production and profits.

The population explosion is not inevitable. It is a result of human choices. The threat of an extremely severe worldwide famine resulting from climate change, exploding populations and end of the fossil fuel era is not inevitable. If such a famine comes, it will be the result of human choices.

The decay of democracy is not inevitable. Oligarchy is not inevitable. These evils are the result of neglect and political irresponsibility. As citizens, we must have the courage to restore democracy in countries where it has disappeared, and to create it in countries where it never existed.

We live in a special time, a time of crisis. Here are the responsibilities that history has given to our generation: We need system change, not climate change! We need a new economic system, a new society, a new social contract, a new way of life. We must achieve a steady-state economic system. We must restore democracy. We must decrease economic inequality. We must break the power of corporate greed. We must leave fossil fuels in the ground. We must stabilize and ultimately reduce global population. We must eliminate the institution of war. And finally, we must develop a mature ethical system to match our new technology.

No one is exempt from these responsibilities. No one can achieve these goals alone; but together we can create the future that we choose.

We humans have been in existence for less than 1% of life on Earth – In the short time of our existence, we have impacted everything; every part of our small blue planet. Our home!

We have been around for only 200,000 years - Archaeologists have calculated that humans originated about 200,000 years ago in the Middle Palaeolithic period in southern Africa, and migrated out of Africa around 70,000 years ago and began colonizing the entire planet. We spread to Eurasia around 40,000 years ago (there is no geologic boundary between Europe and Asia – so they are combined as Eurasia.) and Oceania (roughly Australia to Fiji), and reached the Americas just 14,500 years ago.

Humans are a member of a species of bipedal primates. We walk upright. We also have opposable thumbs so we can grip ‘things’. We have, what we think of as a highly developed brain. And so, we have called ourselves ‘homo sapiens’. In Latin, "Homo" means “man” and "Sapiens" means “wise”. Wise Men.

Dinosaurs existed for 135 million years - It is estimated that dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years, from 231.4 million years ago till around 65 million years ago.

Dinosaurs lived for a greater time on the planet than man. Scientists explain the extinction of dinosaurs with one or two hypotheses - that the extinction was due to an extraterrestrial impact, such as an asteroid or comet, or, a massive bout of volcanism.

We humans though, have been around for a comparatively short while, yet we are making ourselves extinct due to our own activities.

In our short existence, we have impacted every corner of the world with smog, with acid rain; by breaking-up habitats and causing extinctions.

We have taken the route to deforestation to make more room for ourselves. And, through sheer cruelty and indiscriminate killing, we have disturbed the ecological balance of nature. Birds and animals are dying and gradually getting extinct. Seasons and the soil have been changed harmfully. We are waging ecocide to garner greater power to ourselves. We are cruel without remorse and we hold nature, environmental issues, truth and justice in contempt. We will soon be wiping ourselves out due to man-made climate changes and devastation of food and water supply. And, we also wage war with each other. We are killing ourselves.

Our excuse - Cleansing, development and progress - The irony of it all is we justify our destructive tendencies as intervention and manipulation - for cleansing, development and progress. And we do this because we suffer from a delusion that sees us as being separate; we think that we live in a higher plane than everything else. But trees, birds, animals and men are all inseparable parts of nature.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

~ E.F. Schumacher

We humans are part of the same ecosystem. Each creature on this planet has a reason for its existence and is as important to life on earth as we (humans) think we are.

We are dependent on nature. Nature is not dependent on us. When we destroy an ecosystem, we are destroying life that depends on that ecosystem. Humans and nature are powerfully linked and co-evolving. All living things in an ecosystem depend on all the other things - living and non-living - i.e. organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings for continued survival, to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. All the actions and reactions that take place and affect one part of an ecosystem, affect the whole ecosystem in some way or the other.

We are only one small part of the web of life, yet we, in this short time of our existence have treated our planet so shoddily and with such a callous contempt that we have irreversibly damaged our planet and shortened our own existence on the planet.

When nature cannot defend itself there will be a backlash. Nature cannot resist our wiles and will eventually succumb to our destructive tendencies. When forests are mined for minerals and other resources and laid bare of all their biodiversity, desertification will take place. Lakes, rivers and water resources will dry up.

There is no wisdom in man killing what sustains man ... and with it, humankind!

The backlash will not be nature fighting back! But, of nature as we know it, dying out!

Homo Sapiens… Wise Men. Not at all!? Our wisdom is highly disputable. Dinosaurs were considered unintelligent, due to the small size of their brain compared to their body size. They existed for 135 million years. They didn't kill themselves. But, man is destroying mankind.

Our planet is not in danger. Humans are in danger. From ourselves. Humankind is on the road to extinguish ourselves. Sooner rather than later. The future for all of us is bleak. The planet will continue as it has for the 99% of the time before man, it will adjust and continue. Perhaps with other life forms, other vegetation, other landscapes.

The earlier we learn to curb our innate inclination to be brutal, to pollute and to annihilate, and the earlier we will learn to live with compassion and in peaceful co-existence with ourselves and with nature, the better it is for us and our continued existence.

"When we respect the environment, then nature will be good to us. When our hearts are good, then the sky will be good to us. The trees are like our mother and father, they feed us, nourish us, and provide us with everything; the fruit, leaves, the branches, the trunk. They give us food and satisfy many of our needs. So we spread the Dharma (truth) of protecting ourselves and protecting our environment, which is the Dharma of the Buddha. When we accept that we are part of a great human family—that every being has the nature of Buddha—then we will sit, talk, make peace. I pray that this realization will spread throughout our troubled world and bring humankind and the earth to its fullest flowering. I pray that all of us will realize peace in this lifetime and save all beings from suffering”. Maha Ghosananda (1929 – 2007) revered Cambodian Buddhist monk – known as the Gandhi of Cambodia

Pratap Antony, Passive activist/Active pacifist writer on ecology and environment, compassion and humanity, dogs, social justice, music and dance.

“What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister? Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her. Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn. And tied her with fences and dragged her down” ~ Jim Morrison

Earths resources are being wantonly destroyed due to human greed, ignorance, cruelty and sheer recklessness. Our demands around energy, food production and agriculture are destroying surface vegetation, degrading soil structure and fertility and impeding water filtration.

Our impact on the planet has been so profound that biodiversity (the variety of life on earth), forests, earth, water, air, animals, plants, fungi, micro-organisms, are being consumed faster than nature can replenish them. And due to the speed of our impact and the global scale of our activities on Earths resources over the last 250 years, we have inexorably changed the chemistry of the oceans and the character of our soils and the atmosphere; we now face a worrying scarcity of critical resources.

Human activity has degraded, and continues to degrade the environment.

Mining, damming, agriculture, industrialisation, deforestation and so-called development have lead to air and water pollution, elevated carbon dioxide levels and reduced biodiversity. Local ecosystems and the biosphere have been diminished, i.e. human interference has caused the depletion of many natural resources.

Mining - Metals, bauxite and other minerals which co-exist in earth are vital to the well-being of Earth itself. Mining causes permanent and irrecoverable damage to the environment. Mining not only lays bare the land, but makes this land uninhabitable due to the excavation, quarrying and obliteration of precious bio-diverse lands and forests! Mining-waste - dust and atmospheric pollution generated infiltrates and makes its way into water and air and annihilates and drives away animals and plants, birds and bees in a wide area surrounding it. This destruction produces a profound and lasting affect not only on the local ecology, but also on our health and safety.

Water – Fresh water in rivers and lakes is under threat - from dumped industrial and chemical wastes, untreated sewage, fertilisers, medicinal and chemical residues, sediment and toxin-laden run-off. Oceans are now devoid of over 95% of its larger predatory fish, due to over fishing. Coral reefs are degrading almost everywhere due to warming and acidifying seas. Discarded plastic ends up killing and sickening marine life.

Dams - Large Hydroelectric dams not only endanger crops, but also, by immersing fertile riverbank land and surrounding pasture and forest land for the catchment’s basin area, fertile lands, once teeming with life and biodiversity, turn saline over a period of time. The dams themselves, after all the time taken to construct them, and the damage done to the biodiversity and people of the area, become unproductive due to siltation in a short period of time! Dams also dry out river zones that are essential for the survival of people of the area that depend on farming, fishing, gathering fruits, and raising cattle - their traditional means of sustenance. Large dams displace people, rivers, forests and pasture-lands which are the natural wealth of our planet.

Biodiversity which is critical for the survival of the ecosystem is slowly being bled to death. Human activity within the last century has rapidly diminished the diversity of life forms and many species are faced with extinction. Habitat loss due to deforestation and human development has long posed a threat to our Earth.

Food production - comes with a hefty carbon footprint due to damage caused by deforestation and the use of fertilizers and pesticides which pollute our land and water. On top of that, the increased demand for food has given scientists the excuse to try out dangerous experiments; manipulating plant DNA to produce disease resistant crops. GMO (genetically modified organisms), are generally not a good idea, as GMO crop growing and food products pose serious threats to the environment and biodiversity, and when consumed, to animal and human health.

Energy – Fossil fuels are the cause of environmental problems. Yet for our short term requirements of energy, we’re destroying our planet, turning it un-inhabitable, hostile and not-fit-for-human survival. We have to face up to the environmental problem of cleaning up or replacing the burning of fossil fuels that we have been using since the Industrial revolution in the 18th century, with renewable resources, and by developing and adopting clean and renewable energy.

Waste - Modern environmental threats due to technological advancement are, electronic products such as computers, laptops, television sets and mobile phones that are discarded resulting in the release of hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, heavy metals and many other toxic substances into the environment. Besides these, the use of man-made pesticides, herbicides and fungicides can consequently kill, harm and damage our ecosystem, our health and our well-being.

Nuclear waste: There are 31 countries with nuclear reactors. Consequently, there are 31 countries in danger of lethal and irreversible danger due to radiation and radioactivity and its continuing impact on health, water and the environment, during and after production of Nuclear energy - from the mining of uranium > to its transportation > to its use during the process of production > waste during production > transportation > and storage of nuclear waste.

Climate change is real, and it is influenced by human activities. Humanity has released ample greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution in the 18th century, and even more over the last 40 years. Due to compromised environment, we are now starting to feel the effects on our ecosystem. Climate change is becoming more and more obvious in an inevitably warmer world, where there are more frequent ‘extreme’ weather conditions, more floods, more droughts, more cyclones, more hurricanes, heavier rainfall over short periods, less rainfall over longer periods, rising seas, more wildfires, reconfigurations of coastlines, and many more changes of the things that are not in our control than we can imagine.

Consumption - A four-year analysis of the world's ecosystems sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute found that over-consumption has pushed 15 out of 24 ecosystems essential to human life "beyond their sustainable limits". Our insatiable desire for more is moving the planet toward a state of collapse that may be "abrupt and potentially irreversible". John James

Corporatisation – Throughout the world, Corporations buy politicians and keep them safely in their pockets. Large corporations are relentlessly taking over and dictating terms to governments of many states and countries on our planet, naturally, for their own self interest and profit.

Large Corporations take control of mining, petroleum/fossil fuel exploration, retailing, energy, housing and agriculture by taking over fertilisers, pesticides and through the control and industrialisation of GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms). They keep governments in servitude while they get access to our hard earned money and taxes and gamble away our futures. They increase their empires and their profits at public expense without public knowledge. And then they rape and plunder our environment and drive us towards catastrophic climate change and global warming.

Development – Development and ‘corporatisation’ are tied together. The word or idea of ‘Development’, as peddled by politicians is ‘loaded’. Because to politicians, ‘development’ always means, the development of large corporations; industrialists, manufacturers, builders and developers, who build and develop large projects and manufacture products, and commodities.

This idea of development, ostensibly for the benefit of the common people, benefits the already rich and the privileged; it benefits city-dwelling, high-salary employees, industrialists and businessmen, but it does not benefit the vast majority of people who need all the help that they can get, just to survive.

Development works best when it is bottom up. But, it is more lucrative and easy for politicians and economic thinkers to think of top-down development

What should do we do to make amends?

. We must practice harmony, co-existence and mindfulness with intelligence and with a generous spirit. We are nature’s companion and not its boss. We are dependent on nature. Nature is not dependent on us.

. Our companionship and co-dependence with nature is important for our continuing co-evolution and co-existence. Humans are just passers by, a fleeting transitory part of Earth - sharing Earth’s generosity for a short while! Earth, will adapt to changes and evolve with, or without us and continue much after humans cease to exist.

. Strip ourselves of the mindset that we have a special position and therefore, special rights to dominate and exploit earth and comprehend deep within our minds that we do not have any right to manipulate and control nature.

. Be conscious of our responsibility to give back to nature in equal measure whatever we take from it.

Our survival strategy –Embrace reciprocal altruism, compassion and ahimsa – non-harm.

Pratap Antony, Passive activist/Active pacifist writer on ecology and environment, compassion and humanity, dogs, social justice, music and dance.

As they investigate the factors behind the decline of bee populations, scientists are now eyeing a new culprit — soaring levels of carbon dioxide, which alter plant physiology and significantly reduce protein in important sources of pollen.

Specimens of goldenrod sewn into archival paper folders are stacked floor to ceiling inside metal cabinets at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The collection, housed in the herbarium, dates back to 1842 and is among five million historical records of plants from around the world cataloged there. Researchers turned to this collection of goldenrod — a widely distributed perennial plant that blooms across North America from summer to late fall — to study concentrations of protein in goldenrod pollen because it is a key late-season food source for bees.

The newer samples look much like the older generations. But scientists testing the pollen content from goldenrod collected between 1842 and 2014, when atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide rose from about 280 parts per million to 398 ppm, found the most recent pollen samples contained 30 percent less protein. The greatest drop in protein occurred from 1960 to 2014, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose dramatically. A field experiment in the same study that exposed goldenrod to CO2 levels ranging from 280 to 500 ppm showed similar protein decreases.

More than 100 previous studies have shown that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide decrease the nutritional value of plants, such as wheat and rice. But the goldenrod study, published last month, was the first to examine the effects of rising CO2 on the diet of bees, and its conclusions were unsettling: The adverse impact of rising CO2 concentrations on the protein levels in pollen may be playing a role in the global die-off of bee populations by undermining bee nutrition and reproductive success.

“Pollen is becoming junk food for bees,” says Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Research Service in Maryland and lead author of the study. The study itself concluded that the decline of plant proteins in the face of soaring carbon dioxide concentrations provides an “urgent and compelling case” for CO2 sensitivity in pollen and other plant components.

Elevated CO2 levels affect plant physiology by enabling the plant’s starchier parts to grow faster and bigger, since atmospheric carbon dioxide is a building block for plant sugars. For goldenrod, this growth essentially dilutes the plant’s total protein, rather than concentrating it in the grain, which makes a starchier pollen.

“I knew there was work done on insects about how rising CO2 would reduce the protein content of leaves, and so insects will need to eat more leaves to get the same amount of protein,” says Ziska. “But until now, we didn’t know about how CO2 affects protein content in pollen.” The study is a synthesis of the knowledge about what is happening to bees and how CO2 impacts the quality of plants, and it brings those two disparate ideas together.

A number of new and accumulating pressures are threatening bee populations. From 2006 to 2011, annual losses from managed honeybee colonies averaged 33 percent per year in the United States, according to the USDA. Beekeepers have had to replace 50 percent of their colonies in recent years. Factors such as mite outbreaks and the use of neonicotinoid pesticides have been implicated in so-called “colony collapse disorder.”

“I am not saying that understanding neonicotinoids or Varroa mites is not important, but I am saying that how bees respond to these stressors might have something to do with their nutrition,” says Ziska. “If we are mucking around with their nutrition, all these other responses could be affected.”

Bees eat two foods to keep them alive, nectar and pollen, which are fundamentally sugar and protein. Bees can scout a good source of nectar and tell the rest of the hive where it can be found. But bees don’t have a communication strategy for protein. They cannot recognize whether the pollen they consume is a good protein source or not. And by late fall, when bees begin to store food for the winter, the pollen choices are limited.

“It’s not like honeybees and native bees have a menu of lots of different species to choose from,” says Joan Edwards, a pollen ecologist at Williams College in Massachusetts and co-author of the goldenrod study. “Because goldenrod and asters are the only food available for bees [in late season], it limits their ability to adapt. They can’t turn to another food source.”

Some beekeepers have turned to supplementing food for honeybee populations, but native bees like bumble bees don’t have that option, explains Edwards. “Native bees do the lion’s share of pollination,” says Edwards. “Bumble bees and solitary bees provide a free ecosystem service for our food supply. Lack of protein is threatening native pollinators, which has huge public health consequences.” Roughly 35 percent of global crop production depends on pollination to produce fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and oils.

Unlike other insects, which will eat more leaves to compensate for lower protein levels in their food, bees will eat a quantity of pollen, but will not adjust consumption based on nutritional inferiority, says entomologist Jeff Pettis, research leader at the USDA’s bee laboratory. However, at least one laboratory study indicates that bees can be resilient to nutritional stress. The laboratory bees foraged for a broader diet, if one is available, to compensate for a nutrition imbalance by identifying complementary types of pollen — similar to how vegetarians balance legumes and grains to get a complete protein.

“Overall the diet of pollinators is going down due to land degradation, pesticide use, and habitat destruction, and now the protein content of their pollen is less,” says Pettis. Scientists know that inferior-quality pollen has an immediate effect of shortening the lifespan of bees because it directly affects the size and strength of the bee colony that will survive until spring. The lack of nutrition may alter bee behavior and vigor and contribute to colony collapse and degraded health of pollinators.

May Berenbaum, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, says that bees are having a hard time getting enough protein as it is. “A declining quality of protein across the board almost assuredly is affecting bees,” she says. “Like humans, good nutrition is essential for bee health by allowing them to fend off all kinds of health threats. Anything that indicates that the quality of their food is declining is worrisome.”

By itself, the relative effect of lower nutrition might be small, but it still might be important, says David Hawthorne, associate professor of entomology at the University of Maryland. “It’s like death by a thousand blows,” Hawthorne says. “With all of these other stresses on bees, it could still matter because it may just be the straw that breaks the beehives’ back.”

The findings that the nutritional quality of plants is changing and affecting pollinators fits squarely with a new field of interdisciplinary research called Planetary Health, which has emerged to assess the links between a changing planet and plant and human health.

Samuel Myers, a senior research scientist at Harvard’s School of Public Health, has published groundbreaking studies on how rising CO2 levels lower the nutritional quality of foods that we eat, like rice, wheat, and maize, which lose significant amounts of zinc, iron, and protein when grown under higher concentrations of CO2. Plant composition depends on a balance between air, soil, and water. As CO2, the source of carbon for plant growth, proliferates quickly in the atmosphere, soil nutrients — such as nitrogen, iron, and magnesium — remain the same. As a result, plants produce more carbohydrates, but dilute other nutrients.

In one study, Myers estimated that lower nutritional values in crops will push an estimated 132 million to 180 million people into a new risk of zinc deficiency. “Low levels of micronutrients are already an enormous health burden today and where people get iron and zinc is primarily from these kinds of crops,” says Myers. “With rising CO2, they get significant further reductions. That is a big deal from the global nutritional standpoint.”

Myers — director of the Planetary Health Alliance, a new trans-disciplinary consortium aimed at understanding and addressing human health implications of Earth’s changing natural systems — also modeled how the complete decline in pollinators would affect human health. He calculated that the loss of pollinators would place 71 million people into vitamin A deficiency (which is linked to child mortality) and 173 million into folate deficiency (which is associated with birth defects). An additional 2.2 billion people already lacking in vitamin A would suffer more severe deficiencies, he projected. Overall, there would be 1.4 million excess deaths annually from complete pollinator decline.

Now, new research questions are emerging to connect Myers’ research with Ziska’s with the goal of improving understanding of where this reduced pollen protein content is occurring globally and whether it is altering the nutritional status and health of bee populations. “One could imagine there are new nutritional impacts yet to be discovered,” Myers says. “If it is happening in goldenrod, there is no reason to believe this is not happening in other plants.”

Myers said that a core principle in the field of planetary health is the element of surprise, which Ziska’s study illustrates. “We are fundamentally transforming all of the biophysical conditions that underpin the global food system,” said Myers. “Global food demand is rising at the same time the biophysical conditions are changing more rapidly than ever before. Chances are there are more surprises coming down the road. This is the tip of the iceberg in our understanding of changing health in a system that is changing rapidly.”

Beyond the pollen–bee nexus, the extent and rate of multiple interacting environmental changes — including global warming, biodiversity loss, freshwater depletion, ocean acidification, and land use change — are unprecedented in human history. “The research showing how loss of pollinators could have serious adverse effects on nutrition and health outcomes is an important example of how environmental change can undermine human health,” Sir Andy Haines, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said in an email.

Researcher Lewis Ziska thinks plants will adapt and change to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. But gesturing to the stacks of specimens at the herbarium at the Museum of Natural History, he says, “Here are 450,000 plant species, and every other living organism depends on plants as a food source. The fact that they are changing, all at different rates in an unprecedented time — it is pretty remarkable in trying to assess how the entire food web is changing.”

Lisa Palmer is a freelance journalist and a fellow at the National Socio - Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) in Annapolis, Md. She reports on energy, climate change, the environment, and sustainable business for publications such as Slate, Scientific American, and The Guardian. Previously for e360, Palmer reported on how weeds could bolster global food supplies in the face of climate change and whether Indonesia's massive wildfires could help reduce runaway deforestation.

26 April, 2016
TomDispatch.com

"Low-energy Jeb." "Little Marco." "Lyin' Ted." "Crooked Hillary." Give Donald Trump credit. He has a memorable way with insults. His have a way of etching themselves on the brain. And they've garnered media coverage, analysis, and commentary almost beyond imagining.  Memorable as they might be, however, they won't be what last of Trump's 2016 election run.  That's surely reserved for a single slogan that will sum up his candidacy when it's all over (no matter how it ends). He arrived with it on that Trump Tower escalator in the first moments of his campaign and it now headlines his website, where it's also emblazoned on an array of products from hats to t-shirts.

You already know which line I mean: “Make America Great Again!” With that exclamation point ensuring that you won't miss the hyperbolic, Trumpian nature of its promise to return the country to its former glory days. In it lies the essence of his campaign, of what he's promising his followers and Americans generally -- and yet, strangely enough, of all his lines, it's the one most taken for granted, the one that's been given the least thought and analysis. And that's a shame, because it represents something new in our American age. The problem, I suspect, is that what first catches the eye is the phrase “Make America Great” and then, of course, the exclamation point, while the single most important word in the slogan, historically speaking, is barely noted: “again.”

With that “again,” Donald Trump crossed a line in American politics that, until his escalator moment, represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe, of either party, including presidents and potential candidates for that position. He is the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the United States, the “sole” superpower of Planet Earth, is an “exceptional” nation, an “indispensable” country, or even in an unqualified sense a “great” one. His claim is the opposite. That, at present, America is anything but exceptional, indispensable, or great, though he alone could make it “great again.” In that claim lies a curiosity that, in a court of law, might be considered an admission of guilt.  Yes, it says, if one man is allowed to enter the White House in January 2017, this could be a different country, but -- and in this lies the originality of the slogan -- it is not great now, and in that admission-that-hasn't-been-seen-as-an-admission lies something new on the American landscape.

Donald Trump, in other words, is the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline. Think about that for a moment. “Make America Great Again!” is indeed an admission in the form of a boast. As he tells his audiences repeatedly, America, the formerly great, is today a punching bag for China, Mexico... well, you know the pitch. You don't have to agree with him on the specifics. What's interesting is the overall vision of a country lacking in its former greatness.

Perhaps a little history of American greatness and presidents (as well as presidential candidates) is in order here.

“City Upon a Hill”

Once upon a time, in a distant America, the words “greatest,” “exceptional,” and “indispensable” weren't even part of the political vocabulary.  American presidents didn't bother to claim any of them for this country, largely because American wealth and global preeminence were so indisputable.  We're talking about the 1950s and early 1960s, the post-World War II and pre-Vietnam “golden” years of American power.  Despite a certain hysteria about the supposed dangers of domestic communists, few Americans then doubted the singularly unchallengeable power and greatness of the country.  It was such a given, in fact, that it was simply too self-evident for presidents to cite, hail, or praise.

So if you look, for instance, at the speeches of John F. Kennedy, you won't find them littered with exceptionals, indispensables, or their equivalents.  In a pre-inaugural speechhe gave in January 1961 on the kind of government he planned to bring to Washington, for instance, he did cite the birth of a “great republic,” the United States, and quoted Puritan John Winthrop on the desirability of creating a country that would be “a city upon a hill” to the rest of the world, with all of humanity's eyes upon us.  In his inaugural address (“Ask not what your country can do for you...”), he invoked a kind of unspoken greatness, saying, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”  It was then common to speak of the U.S. with pride as a “free nation” (as opposed to the “enslaved” ones of the communist bloc) rather than an exceptional one.  His only use of “great” was to invoke the U.S.-led and Soviet Union-led blocs as “two great and powerful groups of nations.”

Kennedy could even fall back on a certain modesty in describing the U.S. role in the world (that, in those years, from Guatemala to Iran to Cuba, all too often did not carry over into actual policy), saying in one speech, “we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient -- that we are only six percent of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”  In that same speech, he typically spoke of America as “a great power” -- but not “the greatest power.”

If you didn't grow up in that era, you may not grasp that none of this in any way implied a lack of national self-esteem.  Quite the opposite, it implied a deep and abiding confidence in the overwhelming power and presence of this country, a confidence so unshakeable that there was no need to speak of it.

If you want a pop cultural equivalent for this, consider America's movie heroes of that time, actors like John Wayne and Gary Cooper, whose Westerns and in the case of Wayne, war movies, were iconic.  What's striking when you look back at them from the present moment is this: while neither of those actors was anything but an imposing figure, they were also remarkably ordinary looking.  They were in no way over-muscled nor in their films were they over-armed in the modern fashion.  It was only in the years after the Vietnam War, when the country had absorbed what felt like a grim defeat, been wracked by oppositional movements, riots, and assassinations, when a general sense of loss had swept over the polity, that the over-muscled hero, the exceptional killing machine, made the scene.  (Think:Rambo.)

Consider this, then, if you want a definition of decline: when you have to state openly (and repeatedly) what previously had been too obvious to say, you're heading, as the opinion polls always like to phrase it, in the wrong direction; in other words, once you have to say it, especially in an overemphatic way, you no longer have it.

The Reagan Reboot

That note of defensiveness first crept into the American political lexicon with the unlikeliest of politicians: Ronald Reagan, the man who seemed like the least defensive, most genial guy on the planet.  On this subject at least, think of him as Trumpian before the advent of The Donald, or at least as the man who (thanks to his ad writers) invented the political use of the word “again.”  It was, after all, employed in 1984 in the seminal ad of his political run for a second term in office.  While that bucolic-looking TV commercial was entitled “Prouder, Stronger, Better,” its first line ever so memorably went, “It's morning again in America.” (“Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”)

Think of this as part of a post-Vietnam Reagan reboot, a time when the U.S. in Rambo-esque fashion was quite literally muscling up and over-arming in a major way.  Reagan presided over “the biggest peacetime defense build-up in history” against what, referencing Star Wars, he called an “evil empire” -- the Soviet Union.  In those years, he also worked to rid the country of what was then termed “the Vietnam Syndrome” in part by rebranding that war a “noble cause.”  In a time when loss and decline were much on the American brain, he dismissed them both, even as he set the country on a path toward the present moment of 1% dysfunction in a country that no longer invests fully in its own infrastructure, whose wages are stagnant, whose poor are a growth industry, whose wealth now flows eternally upward in a political environment awash in the money of the ultra-wealthy, and whose over-armed military continues to pursue a path of endless failure in the Greater Middle East.

Reagan, who spoke directly about American declinist thinking in his time -- “Let's reject the nonsense that America is doomed to decline” -- was hardly shy about his superlatives when it came to this country.  He didn't hesitate to re-channel classic American rhetoric ranging from Winthop's “shining city upon a hill” (perhaps cribbed from Kennedy) in his farewell address to Lincoln-esque (“the last best hope of man on Earth”) invocations like “here in the heartland of America lives the hope of the world” or “in a world wracked by hatred, economic crisis, and political tension, America remains mankind's best hope.”

And yet, in the 1980s, there were still limits to what needed to be said about America.  Surveying the planet, you didn't yet have to refer to us as the “greatest” country of all or as the planet's sole truly “exceptional” country.  Think of such repeated superlatives of our own moment as defensive markers on the declinist slope.  The now commonplace adjective “indispensable” as a stand-in for American greatness globally, for instance, didn't even arrive until Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright began using it in 1996.  It only became an indispensable part of the rhetorical arsenal of American politicians, fromPresident Obama on down, a decade-plus into the twenty-first century when the country's eerie dispensability (unless you were a junkie for failed states and regional chaos) became ever more apparent.

As for the U.S. being the planet's “exceptional” nation, a phrase that now seems indelibly in the American grain and that no president or presidential candidate has avoided, it's surprising how late that entered the presidential lexicon.  As John Gans Jr. wrote in the Atlantic in 2011, “Obama has talked more about American exceptionalism than Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush combined: a search on UC Santa Barbara's exhaustive presidential records library finds that no president from 1981 to today uttered the phrase ‘American exceptionalism' except Obama. As U.S. News' Robert Schlesinger wrote, ‘American exceptionalism' is not a traditional part of presidential vocabulary. According to Schlesinger's search of public records, Obama is the only president in 82 years to use the term.”

And yet in recent years it has become a commonplace of Republicans and Democrats alike.  In other words, as the country has become politically shakier, the rhetoric about its greatness has only escalated in an American version of “the lady doth protest too much.”  Such descriptors have become the political equivalent of litmus tests: you couldn't be president or much of anything else without eternally testifying to your unwavering belief in American greatness.

This, of course, is the line that Trump crossed in a curiously unnoticed fashion in this election campaign.  He did so by initially upping the rhetorical ante, adding that exclamation point (which even Reagan avoided). Yet in the process of being more patriotically correct than thou, he somehow also waded straight into American decline so bluntly that his own audience could hardly miss it (even if his critics did).

Think of it as an irony, if you wish, but the ultimate American narcissist, in promoting his own rise, has also openly promoted a version of decline and fall to striking numbers of Americans.  For his followers, a major political figure has quit with the defensive BS and started saying it the way it is.

Of course, don't furl the flag or shut down those offshore accounts or start writing the complete history of American decline quite yet.  After all, the United States still looms “lone” on an ever more chaotic planet.  Its wealth remains stunning, its economic clout something to behold, its tycoons the envy of the Earth, and its military beyond compare when it comes to how much and how destructively, even if not how successfully.  Still, make no mistake about it, Donald Trump is a harbinger, however bizarre, of a new American century in which this country will indeed no longer be (with a bow to Muhammad Ali) "the Greatest" or, for all but a shrinking crew, exceptional.

So mark your calendars: 2016 is the official year the U.S. first went public as a declinist power and for that you can thank Donald -- or rather Donald! -- Trump.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt

Women in India do not appear to be active participants in the debate around the chanting of the slogan ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’. Even the debate in the media is dominated through discourse by men.The chanting of this slogan– necessary to prove ‘patriotism’ – is an obsession only of the so called ‘patriotic’men.

Generally men belonging to right-wing political parties are aggressively seen chanting the slogan ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’; rarely is a woman heard chanting it except on a political platform. The slogan is not just a construct of a Brahmanical patriarchal mindset, it is an insult to women-hood and camouflages the ugly truth of how women are treated in this country.The ‘Mother India’– a 1957 Hindi film – while depicting oppressionand suffering of Indian women also glamorizes it.

The image of an ideal woman carried by generations of Indian men is of an all sacrificing woman in face of insurmountable adversities and has given rise to similar expectations from all women. In the same vein the slogan ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’gives a free hand to the patriarchal capitalist forces to exploit the geographical region called India the same way as its women. The harsh truth is that just to stay alive and not being murdered at the hands of the patriarchal forces in this country is an arduous task for women. If a woman survives not being murdered either in the womb or after birth then she faces the risk of being burnt alive at the funeral pyre of the husband (Sati) or for not bringing sufficient dowry. The female child is so much undesired by most communities that according to 2001 census data even “non-violent” Jains were competing with Sikhs when it came to female foeticide – an uncomfortable fact around which there has been little debate. Hindus, needless to say, are worse when it comes to “missing women” in India. For women, odds for survival are better in rural India compared to urban India. The chances of survival further improve if a female child is born in a minority Muslim or Christian family. Anyone in doubt only need to check the statistical data of the Census of India of the last three decades.

If a girl child manages to survive by bypassing foeticide and infanticide the next big battle for her is how to avoid getting raped. And when it comes to rape for the sick male mind age is nobar. From a two month old female child to a seventy year old woman it is a fair game for men. And how does a two month old girl child saveherself from her male relatives or neighbours?As far as domestic violence goes, women being at the bottom of the pyramid in most communities even a male from the most oppressed section of the society feelsfree to beat up his earning wife and spend all her savings in consuming liquor. Staring and stalking faced by women in everyday life is a social reality as is sexual harassment of women at public spaces, public transport and work place. Discrimination in jobs – civil as well as military – is rampant; under-representation of women in parliament, judiciary and executive is considered the norm. And yet the women are referred to as the better half. This is the height of patriarchal cunningness.

Left to themselves, the Indian men would rather that women are banished even from public spaces. Therefore men have made public spaces almost inaccessible for women. Going out alone at night is unthinkable for women in most cities in India, but even in broad daylight it is not without risks. Just walking in Connaught Place (main business district in New Delhi) abuses like mother fucker, sister fucker pour in your ears like molten lead all the time. In the daily life of a woman the issue is not really whether one chants ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ or not as long as she does not have to get her sensitivities and sensibilities hurt by repeatedly being forced to hear abuses centering around a woman’s private parts to wit ‘teri ma ki …’.Often one feels like stopping and hitting these men at the most sensitive part of their anatomy but alas! Openly spitting, blowing their nose, making guttural sounds and urinating constantly in public spaces is a favourite hobby of men irrespective of their class or educational status. A crass and crude show of male power!

Subjugation of women in India is the only kind of oppression that cuts across caste, class, community and race. Women would prefer if men give up these uncivilized, obscene, vulgar, brutal practices against women rather than merely chant ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’. In a country where the incumbent Prime Minister refuses to let his wife live with him in his official residence, the hollowness of the slogan is all too apparent. Women don’t really care about the slogan. Women in India want ‘Azadi’ not idolatry! Just let the women exercise their constitutional right to equality and liberty in all spheres of life – political, economic, social and cultural without any discrimination.Till then the chant should be:

Women of India unite, you have nothing to lose except your patriarchal chains

Environmental awareness must soon reach a critical mass, whereby massive societal resources are re-allocated to scale up solutions in a great ecological transition; before biosphere, social, and economic collapse become unavoidable. An approaching ecological inflection point reflects a narrow band of opportunity to repair fragmented, quivering nature, clearly at its breaking point, before it is too late.

New York City: After 25 years of ecological advocacy, I can say with certainty that I have never seen as much genuine environmental concern as I do now. This has generally not led en masse to required action such as personal dramatic emission cuts and refusal to buy all products from old-growth forests. But for the first time ecological decline including climate change is visibly apparent to a degree that it is readily known by the educated and it can’t be denied by anyone of good faith and character.

Concurrently trend lines for atmospheric and ecosystem decline are more perilous than ever. Humanity is putting the biosphere at great risk, as rampant industrial pollution and clearing of natural vegetation results in abrupt climate change occurring far faster than envisioned, and natural ecosystems failing to provide the surrounding matrix of natural services which makes life possible.

The natural family’s only hope is that an ecological inflection point occurs, whereby the impacts of biosphere collapse become so evident – perhaps as millions die from extreme storms and other depredations – while there is still time to implement sufficient solutions. At that point the human family will howl for the necessary measures to be taken to protect and restore natural ecosystems, and end fossil fuels, on an accelerated emergency basis.

The only questions are whether as ecosystem collapse becoming apparent, will we squabble for what remains as we deny ecologism, or will we remain free as we begin in earnest a great transition to green liberty? And will we have identified and prototyped, and be ready with sufficient ecological solutions, to meet human needs while maintaining a living Earth? The ecological inflection point is a narrow band of opportunity to repair fragmented, quivering nature before it is too late. We must be ready with templates for ecological sustainability, which can employ billions, as a program of ecological restoration and energy conservation are rapidly scaled.

What hope remains for humanity and her habitat as ecological awareness and collapse converge in such a manner, is whether we are able to ramp up fast enough the plethora of ecological solutions we all know about but don’t support enough. These efforts may be abetted by deep wells of global ecological resilience of which we are unaware, as the Earth is a living organism that has self-regulated for 3.5 billion year, yet whose workings remain largely unknown to her peoples.

Clearly we are already in ecological overshoot, as planetary boundaries regarding species loss, terrestrial ecosystem destruction, and industrial emissions of carbon, phosphorous, and nitrogen have already been breached; and thresholds for safe levels of human population, ozone, ocean acidity, aerosols, freshwater, and chemicals draw near.

Yet as mayhem looms, if we all came together to harness all the resources at our disposal – including from conspicuous over-consumption by the rich, and the military-industrial complex’s lucrative war making – surely we could marshal a response that allows the land, air, water, and oceans to rest, recover, and flourish thereby ensuring global ecological sustainability.

Reaching the ecological inflection point that triggers the great ecological transition before it is too late is going to require an end to greenwashing, which means accepting the gravity of our situation and necessary personal and societal changes, and confronting those that continue to greenwash for personal benefit. Celebrity climate activists jetting around to tell us to cut emissions, and large foundation fed bureaucratic environmental groups enriching themselves from old-growth forest logging, will have to be rebuked and shamed until their behavior changes.

And the voices must be amplified of those personally creating lifestyles without cars, traveling less, eating little or no meat, having one child, and limiting their consumption; and coming together to remake a society that is peaceful, just, and equitable. Ecological leadership must walk the walk.

The poor and dispossessed, as well as those that opulently overconsume, can together learn the meaning of enough. Equity does not mean everyone is equal, but everyone’s basic needs must be met as hard workers have more, but not ridiculously so to the detriment of others and the Earth. As livelihoods of the rich and the poor converge to reasonable levels of disparity, the talents of each can be harnessed to power enterprise without fossil fuels, to scale up alternative energy, even as we conserve negawatts.

Vast resources can be put into reclaiming non-productive, depauperate land with the expansion of historically accurate natural ecosystems, built upon restoring and reconnecting ecologically neglected fragments, wherever remaining natural vegetation occurs; intermingled with organic permaculture, to once again ensconce the human species within nature’s nurturing embrace.

Only by leaving fossil fuels in the ground and returning humanity to a sea of nature can biosphere collapse be avoided, and a sustainable future for human and all life assured.

As ecosystems collapse, horrendous suffering is going to become apparent. When we as a collective consciousness understand the magnitude of the situation – basically as mass human and wildlife death can no longer be ignored – we must be ready to scale proven ecological solutions swiftly and prudently. The sooner the ecological inflection point is reached, the greater likelihood we will avert complete and total biosphere collapse, and the end of being. A few extremophiles, and dandelions and cockroaches, may hang on; but complex life may end, and there is no assurance it will reemerge.

We must maximize the probability that enough nature will remain to sustain Gaia, a living Earth, which can essentially go on forever.

It is vitally important that each and every one of us commit to the great ecological transition by continuing to build awareness. That each of us becomes a leader in living well but consuming simply and with great care. And that we engage with the global growth machine to alter the means of enterprise in our image. We must work for ecological change within society and its engine of production, as only by converting business and the rich to our cause of self and ecological survival can we all prevail.

Sadly, I believe the possibility of an ecological inflection point is fading. And that the mass migration, state of perma-war, and resurgence of authoritarian fascism which we are witnessing are the result of environmental decline and resource scarcity. The sooner this can be widely recognized, the sooner we can get on with a massive program to save Earth, all her life, and thus ourselves.

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

Global water shortages, exacerbated by human-caused climate change, are likely to spur conflict and migration across the Middle East, central Asia, and Africa—all while negatively impacting regional economies, according to a new World Bank report published Tuesday.

Rising demand combined with increasingly "erratic and uncertain" supply could reduce water availability in cities by as much as two thirds by 2050, compared to 2015 levels, the report warns. Meanwhile, "food price spikes caused by droughts can inflame latent conflicts and drive migration," a World Bank press statement reads.

The report further cautions: "Unless action is taken soon, water will become scarce in regions where it is currently abundant—such as Central Africa and East Asia—and scarcity will greatly worsen in regions where water is already in short supply—such as the Middle East and the Sahel in Africa. These regions could see their growth rates decline by as much as 6% of GDP by 2050 due to water-related impacts on agriculture, health, and incomes."

However, the World Bank adds, "the negative impacts of climate change on water could be neutralized with better policy decisions, with some regions standing to improve their growth rates by up to 6% with better water resource management."

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Scientists have warned that global warming is setting the stage for more frequent, and more devastating, droughts. Indeed, extreme drought is currently causing hardship in several of the regions named in the World Bank report.

Just this week, Zimbabwe put its wild animals up for sale, "saying it needed buyers to step in and save the beasts from a devastating drought," Reuters reported. On Tuesday, Burkina Faso's government began rationing water in its drought-hit capital, which is home to some two million people. Much of India is currently suffering from a scorching heat wave and severe drought conditions that have decimated crops, killed livestock and humans, and left at least 330 million Indians without enough water for their daily needs.

The World Bank's warning comes on the heels of a study published this week in the journal Climatic Change, which suggests that the Middle East and North Africa could become "uninhabitable" by the end of this century due to climate change and increasing hot weather extremes.

Echoing the World Bank, the Max Planck Institute researchers behind that study wrote: "We anticipate that climate change and increasing hot weather extremes in the [Middle East and North Africal], a region subject to economic recession, political turbulence and upheaval, may exacerbate humanitarian hardship and contribute to migration."

On April 26th, Reuters headlined from Romania, “‘We’re Not Here to Provoke,’ Say U.S. Pilots on Putin’s Doorstep”, and gave as an example: “‘We're not here to provoke anybody, we're here to work with our allies,’ says Dan Barina, a 26-year-old pilot on his first trip to a region where tensions have risen markedly since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Romania's neighbor Ukraine two years ago.”

How can it not be ‘provoking', when Russia now faces a threat from Obama and America's NATO alliance, that’s vastly worse than what America had faced from the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the USSR’s Warsaw Pact alliance in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis? That was just one missile-base, 90 miles from the U.S. — not dozens of them, some right on Russia’s border. Are those American pilots idiots to believe their superiors’ absurd statements about what their mission is, or is insanity the explanation here — or, is there even some third explanation possible for this oblivious statement from the American pilot? Perhaps those soldiers and airmen are simply drowning in (or drunk with) U.S. propaganda? They really believe that Russia is moving too close to NATO, not that NATO has already moved too close to Russia? Really? The Reuters report said that NATO countries were doing this to protect themselves from “an increasingly aggressive Russia.” Wow. But that’s the line promoted by U.S. President Barack Obama. And he’s accepted as a decent person not only by the millions of voters in his own Democratic Party (though not in the Republican Party, which blames him for everything except the truth: that he is governing so far to the right that they have to concoct false ‘leftist’ reasons to criticize him); but, he’s also respected even by the publics in Europe, where they suffer the flood of refugees from the invasions he leads. After all: one must never underestimate the power of propaganda, to warp the public’s minds.

On February 2nd, the U.S. ‘Defense’ Secretary, Russia-hater Ashton Carter, announced — and the equally Russia-hating NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed and endorsed — America’s quadrupling of its troops and weapons on and near Russia’s northwestern borders; and America’s pilot Dan Barina is part of this extremely hostile action, by the U.S. and NATO, against the people in Russia.

Russia is now surrounded, on and near its borders, by numerous U.S. nuclear weapons — weapons and troops that are as close to St. Petersburg and Moscow as they can possibly get without actually invading Russia.

In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the USSR and ended its Warsaw Pact, upon a promise from the regime of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush to the then-Soviet (soon-to-become merely Russian) leader, that NATO would move “not one inch to the east” — a promise which the American President told his people in private was actually a lie, but which they, and all subsequent U.S. Presidents, have accepted as Western policy founded on that lie, by expanding NATO not merely “one inch to the east,” but right up to Russia’s very borders. That’s what this February 2nd policy by U.S. President Barack Obama and his NATO stooges is bringing substantially closer to culmination.

How can this not be “provocative”? What type of idiot can believe his superiors when they say “We’re not here to provoke anybody”? Of course, it’s not to “provoke” Russians: it’s to downright terrify them. They’d have to be crazy not to be terrified, at being increasingly surrounded by these WMD, from what is increasingly clearly their enemy.

This big lie, that what America is doing there is ‘defensive’, is stanched up by other, lesser, lies, such as Obama’s lie that the reason why he’s expanding America’s Strategic Defense Initiative (anti-ballistic missile, or ‘star wars’) system, in Europe, has been to protect Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles. Iran never had nuclear weapons, and Obama reached an agreement with Iran that will for decades prevent Iran from having them, but he still expands the SDI system right up to Russia’s borders, as ‘protection against Iran’. The people who protest against Obama’s lies are then marginalized as mere kooks, which is the way to get idiots to ignore even the most barefaced facts (such as Western terrorization of the Russian population), because only idiots can continue to believe such liars as the Obama regime, when their lies are so obvious as this. These protests against Obama and NATO and all of Western aggression, aren’t coming from America’s Republicans or other right-wingers: the smearing of these protesters with that broad-brush taint can be believed only by idiots — people who are willingly suckers, suckers notwithstanding the blatancy with which the facts run against the lies they swallow.

From the very get-go, in 1983 — when the Republican U.S. President, Ronald Reagan (with the active support of Ashton Carter at MIT), started the SDI project, under the lie that disabling a combatant’s retaliatory ability isn’t profoundly aggressive against that opponent (basically checkmating him) — the SDI concept was aimed at achieving an invasion of the Soviet Union which couldn’t be effectively countered; it was aimed ultimately at replacing the balance-of-power system of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD), by a gross imbalance of power that would enable conquest of the opponent; it would enable a blitz-attack against the Soviet Union, an attack which wouldn’t be able effectively to be responded to via a counter-attack; it would enable an attack which would pre-emptively disable that response to it. In other words: it’s all a con, a lie, to say that SDI is ‘purely a defensive measure’. It can be the most decisive aggressive measure, the only way that’s even conceivable to ‘win’ a nuclear war (as some of the West’s aristocrats think can be done).

Wikipedia notes about Ashton Carter: “Carter was a supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as an advocate of preventive wars against North Korea and Iran.[43][44][45] In response to increase in tension in Ukraine, Carter considered proposing deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe that could pre-emptively destroy Russian weapons.” That’s a “hawkish” background just as Hillary Clinton’s is, virtually indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; and yet, Barack Obama, when he was starting his political career in a region where the opposition to invading Iraq was strong, Obama claimed that he opposed invading Iraq. Yet, somehow, once he was finally inside the White House, suddenly the people he was surrounding himself with were Wall-Street-backed individuals who had supported invading Iraq (and any other country whose leader was friendly toward Russia). He did to Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, what George W. Bush did to Iraq. If that’s not fraudulent ‘democracy’, then what is? The public had been given no indication they would be getting, with Barack Obama, merely a more-articulate version of George W. Bush.

America has been lying not only regarding its aggressive designs against the Soviet Union, but (and this is far more heinous) — afterward, when the supposed ‘ideological’ reason for the Cold War had ended — it is lying even more blatantly in its ‘justifications’ for its (and NATO’s) anti-Russia policies despite communism having ended and the Soviet Union (and its Warsaw Pact) disbanded.

How much longer will the aristocracy that control the U.S. Government be able to get away with such obvious lies, such continuation and even escalation of the “Cold War” after its very raison d’etre (anti-communism) is long-since gone? If it turns out to be too long, then only a matter of time will pass before those buttons get pushed and those nuclear weapons are released, to destroy the world. Horrific as those weapons are, they are built, and manned, to be used. If this seems unimaginable, then the question has to be this: Is it as unimaginable as is the manifested-existing evilness of America’s aristocracy (such as Barack Obama, Ashton Carter, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, George Soros, the Koch brothers, etc.) and of the aristocracies (in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere) that are allied with it?

And, the use of ‘Crimea’ as an excuse for this restoration of the “Cold War” (which is already a hot war in Ukraine, Syria, and other lands, where the U.S. sees fit to replace leaders that ally with Russia), is just as bogus as is the use of ‘Iranian nuclear weapons’ as an excuse for installing SDI. Any aristocracy that needs to lie so blatantly in order to continue along such a catastrophic path as this, needs to be defeated, instead of to be believed and obeyed. They might as well be Satan. Except that, unfortunately, they’re not mythological — which makes all the difference: this demon is all-too-real.

Here are some news reports from perhaps the world’s best living investigative reporter, Christof Lehmann, who has provided shocking details about how vile this global-aristocratic operation is, regarding Syria — entailing not only the U.S. aristocracy, but the European ones, and the Arabic ones, the entire rotten-through-and-through “Western alliance” (an alliance of aristocracies who can be satisfied with nothing less than their collective global conquest).

The first report, on 2 May 2013, titled “EU Lifts Oil Embargo on Syria – Buys Directly from Al Qaeda”, summarizes the key facts that Western media had already reported (prior to their being virtually banned from reporting these things in the West), things such as that 27 of the 28 EU nations had already decided in April 2013 to purchase oil stolen from Syria by “the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked rebel group,” in order to assist the Saudi and Qatari royals in financing “the moderate opposition forces” (such as Al Qaeda — the group that had perpetrated 9/11 and other terrorist attacks against Western populations; and, even Seymour Hersh reported, on 4 April 2014, that Obama and U.S. allies were supplying weapons to al-Nusra) to defeat the Syrian army of Bashar al-Assad. (Assad is Shiite but secular, the opposite of fundamentalist Sunni Islamic, which is the jihadism that the Sauds and their fellow-Arab royals are devoted to; and Assad is furthermore allied with those Arab-royals’ chief oil-and-gas competitor, Russia; so, Western aristocracies help these Sunni jihadists who are being sent into Syria to overthrow Assad.)

The second in the series, on 8 August 2013, was titled “EU/US Al-Qaeda Massacres on Kurds for Oil and Secession.” It opened with this summary:

In April 2013, the European Union lifted its embargo on the import of oil from “rebel held” Syrian territories. The import [of oil] is primarily to come from the predominantly Kurdish region of Syria. In July and August 2013, confirmed and unconfirmed reports about massacres of Kurds, committed by western-backed, Al-Qaeda associated insurgents, increase simultaneously with an influx of insurgents [jihadists] from western countries. An estimated 17,000 fighters from the Kurdish Workers´ Party, PKK have deployed from Turkey to the region near Irkuk, in the Kurdish Administrated Region of Iraq. The function of the EU/US strategy – massacres [of Syria’s civilian population] for oil, to finance mercenaries [those jihadist groups that are pouring into Syria to eliminate Assad], and to create a demand for secession among Syrian Kurds, over perceived security concerns.

The third in the series, on 22 June 2014, was titled, “U.S. Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq – Hariri Insider”, and it opened:

The green light for the use of ISIS brigades to carve up Iraq, widen the Syria conflict into a greater Middle East war and to throw Iran off-balance, was given behind closed doors at the Atlantic Council meeting in Turkey, in November 2013, told a source close to Saudi-Lebanese billionaire Saad Hariri, adding that the U.S. Embassy in Ankara is the operation’s headquarters.

A “trusted source” close to the Saudi-Lebanese multi-billionaire and former Lebanese P.M. Saad Hariri told, on condition of anonymity, that the final green light for the war on Iraq with ISIS or ISIL brigades was given behind closed doors, at the sidelines of the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 22-23, 2013. …

“Certain circles in Washington put a hell of a lot of pressure on Obama to put a gun to al-Maliki’s head”, said the Hariri source, adding that “time was running out and Obama was hesitant.” Asked what he meant with “time was running out” and if he could specify who it was that pushed Obama, he said: …“Who exactly pressured Obama? I don’t know who delivered the message to Obama.” …

The summit was, among others, attended by Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernst Monitz, Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft [and others]. … Noting that a prominent member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, Prince Abdul Rachman al-Faisal has been named as the one being “in command” of the ISIS brigades, and if he could either confirm or deny, he nodded, adding that “the Prince” is responsible for financing the operation and for part of the command structure, but that the operations headquarters is the U.S. Embassy in Ankara Turkey.

The fourth in this series, on 7 October 2013, was titled, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria”, and it’s so good, it simply must be read (just click onto that link). This report documented that Obama’s accusation that Assad had been responsible for the August 2013 sarin attack in Syria is a lie, and that Obama and his allies are the actual people who were behind that sarin attack. It opened: “Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry.” It described the scheme, by the White House, plus Saudi King Salman, plus Turkey’s President Erdogan, plus Qatar’s Emir Thani, to run sarin-precursor chemicals from Muammar Gaddafi’s stockpiles through Turkey into Syria, to be turned there into sarin, so that the 21 August 2013 gassing in Ghouta Syria resulted, and it was blamed, by these liars, against Assad, so that it could be used by U.S. President Obama as the excuse to do to Assad what Obama and his allies had already done to Gaddafi.

There were many subsequent news-reports, by Seymour Hersh and others, which documented different aspects of this operation, but none gave a fuller picture of it than did the original, by Christof Lehmann.

By no coincidence, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, all were leaders who had been friendly toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The idea among the Western aristocracies is to eliminate all of Putin’s foreign allies, and then (once he has no foreign allies remaining) to get rid of Putin himself, because Putin refuses to buckle to Western control.

As regards jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda and even ISIS: though they’re of big concern to Western publics, Western aristocrats are far more concerned to conquer Russia. Their foreign policies display this top priority of theirs. To these aristocrats, jihadists are just a side-show. The main event is Russia. The end of communism, and of the USSR, and of the Warsaw Pact, don’t really make any difference to them. They want the land, and its resources. They don’t care about the people on it — anywhere. Just nuke ’em, maybe? It’s a messy job, but it’s the type of job for people such as Dan Barina. Western taxpayers pay their salaries, but the people who control what they do are the Western aristocrats.

Thus, for example, Obama’s National Security Strategy 2015 uses the term “aggression” 18 times, and 17 of them refer to Russia; none of them refer to Al Qaeda, nor to ISIS (which he calls instead “ISIL,” because that’s the English-language version of “DAESH,” the name that the royal Sauds give to the organization), nor to the Sauds and the other Arabic royal families, who finance jihadist groups. (Their only demand upon them is to avoid perpetrating their terrorism within their own countries — to do it only abroad.) However, if the West’s enemies are their own aristocracies, which control both their government and their ’news’ media, then it makes sense that their propaganda will blame Russia and its allies (i.e.: blame the countries the West’s aristocrats want to conquer), for everything they can concoct to blame them. Where the public’s main enemy is in charge, it’s natural for that enemy’s chief foreign enemy to be blamed by the government and the ‘news’ media, so as to get one enemy of the aristocrats (their own public) fearful of the aristocrats’ other enemy (the foreign aristocracy they want to defeat). “Let’s have you and him fight it out.”

Western governments have been heisted by Western aristocrats. This is what has become of “Western ‘democracy’” — and not only of Western kings and princes such as reign in the Arabic countries. They’re all actually tyrannies, even the ones (such as Obama) who speak pretty phrases — who lie right and left about why they are doing what they are doing.

The entire U.S. alliance — all of the aristocracies that comprise it — are rotten to the core. Millions of refugees have poured into Europe, and the publics in Europe are outraged, but the people who are behind it all are their own nation’s leadership (both elected and unelected), who support or even participate in American invasions and coups — not those refugees, from the mass-murder and chaos those Western leaders had caused, in Iraq, in Libya, in Ukraine, in Syria, and elsewhere. The publics in the West take the terrorist attacks and other blows, while their government and media blame Russia and its allied countries such as the BRICS, though the real villains are their own national leadership, and the leadership of “the Western alliance” — the invasion-alliance.

The sickness, that’s destroying the world, emanates from Washington and Riyadh, not from Moscow and Beijing. The proper name for it is “conquest.” This is not the way authentic democracy functions. Feudalism used to function this way. Fascism now does. And now, the biggest of all its Big Lies is that it’s all being done in order to “promote world peace and security.” It’s like in George Orwell’s allegorical novel, 1984.

The real enemy lies within, where it reigns, even in the outlying aristocracies. It calls itself “the Western alliance.” It’s not only responsible for the invasions that are increasingly a curse upon the world; it (via the “Collective Defense” provision of the NATO portion of it) constitutes the hair-trigger for global nuclear annihilation.

Either NATO will end, or the world as we’ve always known and wanted to live in it, will. It’s one or the other. George Herbert Walker Bush left us this curse upon the world, and the challenge now is to end NATO now, because, if it shouldn’t have ended when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact did, then when should it end — or is it going to end only when the world-as-we’ve-known-it ends: in nuclear annihilation? If it’s not going to end in nuclear annihilation, then a global decision will have to be made, that NATO is a criminal organization, which must be ended now.

The result of that would be a better and a safer world, for everybody. Aristocratic dreams of world-conquest have already reached beyond the danger-point, to the alarm-bell. If the solution is not now, it will be the final solution for everybody. The dreams of Obama and many others in the U.S. aristocracy, for “Prompt Global Strike” and “The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy”, are a mythical solution that will actually lead inevitably to such a final solution — not only for Russians, but for everyone.

Peter S. Rieth, at East-West Accord, headlined on April 28th, “Are Poland’s Elites Itching for War with Russia?” and he documented that they are, and that their hatred of Russians goes back at least to when “Poland invaded Kiev in 1919.” He vaguely urges the Obama Administration to withdraw its thousands of new troops and new weapons from Poland, because, “The United States fails to recognize that although it will presumably retain command over any American troops eventually stationed in Poland, it will be helpless in the face of Polish impetuosity.” But his statement is ambiguous, weak, and even evasive: the actual reason that (as he only implicitly acknowledges) the Polish aristocracy’s “impetuosity” could produce World War III, is that both Poland and the U.S. have signed the NATO Treaty with its mutual-defense Article Five saying, in effect, that whenever one member-nation claims to have been attacked by Russia, the U.S. will launch its nuclear weapons against Russia. The only rational opinion of such a commentary as that, is: Cut it out! The reality is: End NATO now!! NATO after 1991 is a criminal organization, the biggest threat to the entire world; and, such pusillanimous commentaries, which don’t even point to the real hair-trigger for nuclear war, are worthless.

Nothing short of ending NATO now, will suffice. Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact in 1991. When will NATO end — or will the world end first?

The worst part of it is: Germany, France, and UK, haven’t yet withdrawn from NATO. Until they do, NATO will continue to be the red-hot danger it is. No rational voter in any of those countries will vote for any politician who fails to state clearly: End NATO Now! We must withdraw from NATO!!

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

As you can see, the February temperature anomaly hit 1.35 degrees, by far the greatest in history; a few weeks before, the Paris conference had given lipservice to a goal of keeping below 1.5 degrees, already apparently impossible with the temperature anomaly passing 0.8 degrees, That wasn't supposed to happen until we passed 2 degrees, but here we are at 1.35 only two years after we were at 0.8. Hmmm. It looks sort of as if we should have drawn the line of relative safety at 0.8 degrees ior below nstead of two but that's MUCH too llittle information to go on because the numbers are too "noisy."

What's really going on? We know El Ninos produce spikes, but not like this.

We all know ice is melting in the arctic, which people say is bad because Miami could drown if enough ice melts. It turns out drowning cities are not all.-Here's a picture of the September arctic ice cover since 1979. As you can see, the ice cover has dropped most dramatically in the last decade, with the last nine years being by far the lowest nine.http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2015/10/2015-melt-season-in-review/

On May 4th, Russia’s Sputnik news agency headlined "Lavrov: US Tried to Include Al-Nusra Front Positions in 'Silent’ Period”, and reported that Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking in Moscow about the lengthy negotiations between himself and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to agree on conditions for a Syrian ceasefire and peace talks to take place between Syria’s government and Syria’s rebels, said, "During the negotiations, our US partners actually tried to draw the borders of this ‘zone of silence’ to include a significant number of positions occupied by al-Nusra [Front]. We managed to exclude this as it is absolutely unacceptable.”

Al Qaeda in Syria calls itself “Al Nusra."

The “zone of silence” or “silent period” (and there are other phrases for it) refers to the areas in Syria that would be excluded from the ceasefire.

In other words: Lavrov was saying that whereas Russia’s President Putin refuses to stop military action in Syria to kill Syria’s Al Qaeda, America’s President Obama has been continuing, ever since the U.S.-Russian negotiations for a ceasefire in Syria started in January of this year, to insist that Russia must stop bombing those jihadists. Russia’s Foreign Minister was saying that Obama has been trying to protect Al Nusra.

Here is a chronological presentation of the reporting in the Western press, about U.S. President Obama’s efforts on behalf of Syria’s Al Qaeda (Al Nusra):

On 7 January 2016, Seymour Hersh reported in the London Review of Books,

Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China. ...

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. …

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. ...

On 20 January 2016, the AP headlined "Kerry, Lavrov try to settle differences over Syrian talks”, and reported,

Differences over which Syrian opposition groups should be labeled terrorists and barred from the negotiations and the ceasefire have led to concerns that the talks may have to be postponed. Russia and Iran, which back Assad, have immense differences with Saudi Arabia, other Arab states, the United States and Europe over which opposition groups should be considered terrorists and therefore excluded.

On 12 February 2016, the New York Times bannered, "In Syria, Skepticism That Cease-Fire Will Stop Fighting”, and reported that,

With the proviso that the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, can still be bombed, Russia puts the United States in a difficult position; the insurgent groups it [i.e., the U.S.] supports cooperate in some places with the well-armed, well-financed Nusra in what they [i.e., the U.S. government] say is a tactical alliance of necessity [with Nusra] against [Syrian] government forces. So Russia can argue that many of them [by which the NYT journalist refers to anti-Assad fighters] are, in effect, Nusra affiliates.

On 16 February 2016, independent journalist Gareth Porter headlined "Obama’s ‘Moderate’ Syrian Deception”, and reported that,

Information from a wide range of sources, including some of those the United States has been explicitly supporting, makes it clear that every armed anti-Assad organization unit in those provinces is engaged in a military structure controlled by Nusra militants. All of these rebel groups fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities with it.

That reporter, unlike some others, assumes that Obama’s support of Syria’s Al Qaeda is due to Obama’s weakness in adhering to the desires of haters of Russia, both in the U.S. and among America’s allies abroad:

President Obama is under pressure from these domestic critics as well as from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other GCC allies to oppose any gains by the Russians and the Assad regime as a loss for the United States.

Mr. Porter presents no evidence backing up his assumption that President Obama is reluctant to adhere to this obsession against Russia. Seymour Hersh had reported, in his 7 January 2016 LRB report, facts that contradict Mr. Porter’s assumption:

General Dempsey and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out.’

In other words: Despite the opposition by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Obama was determined to help Nusra replace the Assad government. Despite what Mr. Porter assumed, Barack Obama was not a weak President, but instead a very determined President, a President who fired people in his Administration who advised him against continuing his attempt to replace al-Assad by al-Nusra. Russia insisted on bombing them, and reluctantly — and in fits and starts — U.S. President Obama accepted Russia’s condition.

—

On 19 February 2016, the Washington Post bannered "U.S., Russia hold Syria cease-fire talks as deadline passes without action”, and reported that,

Russia was said to have rejected a U.S. proposal to leave Jabhat al-Nusra off-limits to bombing as part of a cease-fire.

That report even included an indication that President Obama’s current Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, who started his job on 17 February 2015, after the war against Syria was already well under way and Obama had replaced the people on his team who were opposed to it, is, if anything, even more obsessive against Russia than Obama himself is:

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter was said to have opposed the high-level contact with the Russians, at least initially.

In other words: when Obama replaced Chuck Hagel by Ashton Carter, he was replacing someone whom he held to be insufficiently anti-Russian, by a person, Carter, who is so extremely hostile toward Russians, as to have since been restrained by Obama from pursuing this hostility as forcefully as he wishes to. The only Cabinet member mentioned there as having persuaded Obama not to follow Carter’s more aggressive stance against Russia was Obama’s second-term Secretary of State, John Kerry.

On 20 February 2016, Reuters headlined "Syrian opposition says temporary truce possible, but deal seems far off”, and, under the sub-head “Nusra Front in Spotlight," reported that,

A source close to peace talks earlier told Reuters Syria's opposition had agreed to the idea of a two- to three-week truce.
The truce would be renewable and supported by all parties except Islamic State, the source said.
It would be conditional on the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front no longer being attacked by Syrian government forces and their allies.

Of course, “Syria’s opposition” there included the United States; and so the U.S. President was, at that time, still insisting upon rejecting the Russian President’s demand that Nusra be included in the “zone of silence,” the locations where the war would continue uninterrupted during the otherwise-ceasefire.

That report went on:

The spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, said on Saturday: "Russia is sticking to its consistent policy of rendering assistance and aid to the armed forces of Syria in their offensive actions against terrorists and against terrorist organisations."
The source close to peace talks described the opposition's insistence on the Nusra Front no longer being targeted as "the elephant in the room".

Obama, like King Saud, Emir Thani, Tayyip Erdogan, and the other enemies of Russia, still stood firm that Nusra not be destroyed.

Therefore, the issue of whether Putin would be allowed to continue bombing Nusra was a heavy topic of disagreement between Obama's pro-al-Qaeda-in-Syria alliance, versus Putin’s anti-al-Qaeda-in-Syria alliance.

Seymour Hersh’s 7 January 2016 LRB article concluded:

Obama now has a more compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdoğan. Dempsey and his associates remain mystified by Obama’s continued public defence of Erdoğan, given the American intelligence community’s strong case against him – and the evidence that Obama, in private, accepts that case.

Even though Obama accepts the case that Turkey’s leader, Erdoğan, is a dangerous man to be allied with, Obama moves forward with what is perhaps the most rabidly hostile toward Russia U.S. Administration ever. And this is after the USSR, and its NATO-mirror organization, the Warsaw Pact, were terminated by Russia in 1991, and after Al Qaeda perpetrated not only 9/11 but many other terrorist attacks, not only in the U.S., but in many of America’s allied countries — not to mention in Russia itself.

Furthermore, Seymour Hersh, in his 4 April 2014 article in LRB, “The Red Line and the Rat Line”, said that,

The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway [of weapons from Gaddafi’s stockpiles in Libya] into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida.

And, even prior to that, on 7 October 2013, Christof Lehmann at his site nsnbc.me, headlined “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria”, and opened by summarizing:

Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry.

He said that, regarding the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack, which Obama claims crossed his “red line” to launch an invasion of Syria to overthrow Assad, and which Hersh and others report to have been based actually on Obama’s and his allies’ “Rat Line” of weapons from Libya into Syria, the initial decision was made by the Saudi agent in Syria, Zahran Alloush:

The final decision, made by Zahran Alloush may in fact have been predetermined together with his U.S. – Saudi liaison officers.
Launching a chemical weapons attack would allow the USA, UK and France, to call for military strikes against Syria and to turn the tide.

Zahran Alloush was killed by a Russian missile on Christmas Day 2015, and his nephew and close associate Mohammed Alloush was chosen by King Salman al-Saud (actually by his son Prince Salman al-Saud) to lead the Syrian opposition in the peace talks on the Syrian war. Zahran Alloush, like the Saud family, favored extermination of Shiites (including Assad), and so does Mohammed Alloush, which (besides the Alloushes’ support of foreign jihad generally) is perhaps the main reason why the Sauds had selected him to lead the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-Turkish side in these peace negotiations against Syria. However, the Alloushes also greatly admire Osama bin Laden, who founded Al Qaeda; and, so, in total, there can be little if any doubt that what Lavrov was reported on May 4th to have said about Obama’s support for Syria’s Al Qaeda makes sense, even though Obama himself had arranged for bin Laden to be killed.

It seems that, at least after Obama’s success at killing off many of Al Qaeda’s leaders, he is determined to support Al Qaeda’s original jihad, which had been against the Soviet Union, and which continues now against Russia and its ally Assad. Obama therefore protects, and helps to arm, Al Qaeda in Syria, so as to eliminate, if possible, yet another ally of Russia (after Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Viktor Yanukovych): this time Bashar al-Assad.

Whereas the U.S. and its allies will not likely affirm what Lavrov said, the facts do — even some that have been reported in the Western press — not only in non-Western media.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

07 May, 2016
Strategic-culture.org

Dr. Christina Lin, a leading young scholar on jihadist groups, opened her April 8th commentary at Asia Times:

In a blunder reeking of the fallout caused by supplying Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to 1980s mujahideen in Afghanistan, civilian airline passengers are now under threat from Syrian jihadists armed with portable surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS).

Reports say some American-backed jihadi groups are being equipped with US-made MANPADS. Indications are they’re obtaining these advanced weapons either directly or indirectly from the US or its Mideast allies in connection with a recent escalation in the fighting in Syria.

On April 2, fighting broke out between western-backed al-Qaeda affiliates and the Syrian army, ending the Syrian ceasefire. The groups that broke the ceasefire included al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra), the Chinese Uyghur Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), The Levant Brigade, the Freemen of Syria (Ahrar al-Sham), Division 13, and other jihadi groups. According to AP, the US-trained and armed Division 13 is now fighting alongside al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. The latter two are part of the Turkey/Saudi/Qatar-backed Army of Conquest.[1]

That report went on to document, essentially, that U.S. President Barack Obama is continuing his efforts to replace the the only secular, non-sectarian government in the Middle East, that of the Ba’athist Party, which has always been the only non-religious political party in the Arabic world — everything else in Arabia has been fundamentalist-Sunni, to at least some extent (enough for even the least-fundamentalist of America’s Arab allies to cooperate with al-Nusra, which is Al Qaeda in Syria). Nusra has also received direct support from America and its allies, through Turkey, which is a member-nation of NATO and serves as the transit-route into Syria for the thousands of jihadists (all of whom are Sunni) flowing into Syria to bring down Bashar al-Assad. Those jihadists, in turn, are the forces on the ground in Syria that are trying to take over the country — bring down the secular Shiite Assad and replace his Ba’athist government (which is allied with Russia), by a Sunni Shariah-law government (allied with Saudi Arabia). (Think of it: after 9/11, the U.S. government is aiding Al Qaeda! The U.S. government is more against Russia than it’s against jihadists — though Russia never invaded the U.S., and communism is gone! Crazy but true.)

Dr. Lin quotes a Saudi official as saying (in Germany’s Spiegel), “We believe that introducing surface-to-air missiles in Syria is going to change the balance of power on the ground … just like surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan were able to change the balance of power there.” He was referring to this in 1979, where Obama’s friend Zbigniew Brzezinski explained why the Americans and the Saudis were supplying SAMs to the mujahideen who became Al Qaeda, and he was also referring to this in 1998, where Brzezinski, when asked whether he thought that arming those fundamentalist Sunnis had been a mistake, said that it certainly was not. Obama is continuing in that (rabidly anti-Russian) vein. Brzezinski still was talking there as if Russia = USSR = “the enemy.” Obama acts from that same viewpoint — the viewpoint that will end either in WW III, or else in Russia’s capitulation to the U.S. aristocracy.

In their view, the end of communism, and the end of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Soviets’ Warsaw Pact (which was the Soviets’ counterpart to America’s NATO alliance), made and make no difference, and Syria should be ruled by jihadist groups instead of by its current government, because Syria’s current government is allied with Russia, and Russia always tries to kill jihadists, never allies with them (as the U.S. does).

Obama overthrew the Russia-friendly government of Ukraine and replaced it with an anti-Russian government; he also led the NATO bombing campaign that overthrew the Russia-friendly leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi; and he has since been trying to do the same thing in Syria, to Assad.

Dr. Lin continues:

Now, if it turns out that al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria are indeed armed with MANPADS, it would amount to what former CIA director David Petraeus called “our worst nightmare.” The missile would do far more than improve terrorist groups’ military capabilities to conduct future attacks.

A 2005 RAND study also concluded that jihadis shooting down a civilian airliner would put a temporary freeze on worldwide air travel, causing a $15 billion loss to the world economy.[8] More than a decade after this study, the present-day economic loss would be substantially higher than $15 billion.

Dr. Lin’s calling this from Obama a “blunder” is based upon an assumption that Obama isn’t aware of the harms that he’s causing by what he’s doing; but, on the same day, a report, including shocking documentation from Jane’s (the specialist site about military matters), made clear that Obama is determined to overthrow Assad no matter what the consequences.

The anonymous “Moon of Alabama” blogger posted at Global Research on April 8th, “U.S. Delivers 3,000 Tons Of Weapons And Ammo To Al-Qaeda and Co. in Syria.” Shown there is the “Simplified packing list for December 2015 arms” that were sent. The anonymous blogger explained:

One ship with nearly one thousand tons of weapons and ammo left Constanta in Romania on December 5. The weapons are from Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. It sailed to Agalar in Turkey which has a military pier and then to Aqaba in Jordan. Another ship with more than two-thousand tons of weapons and ammo left in late March, followed the same route and was last recorded on its way to Aqaba on April 4.

We already knew that the “rebels” in Syria received plenty of weapons during the official ceasefire. We also know that these “rebels” regularly deliver half of their weapon hauls from Turkey and Jordan to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra):

Hard-core Islamists in the Nusra Front have long outgunned the more secular, nationalist, Western-supported rebels. According to FSA officers, Nusra routinely harvests up to half the weapons supplied by the Friends of Syria, a collection of countries opposed to Assad, ..

U.S. and Turkey supported “rebels” took part in the recent attack on Tal al-Eis against Syrian government forces which was launched with three suicide bombs by al-Qaeda in Syria. This was an indisputable breaking of the ceasefire agreement between Russia and the U.S. It is very likely that some of the weapons and ammunition the U.S. delivered in December were used in this attack.

Consequently, Obama is clearly determined to supply weapons to the jihadists until they win. This is no “blunder” on his part. It’s a determination to beat Putin, no matter what. It has consequences not only for the U.S. and for Russia, but for the countries that America invades or whose governments America overthrows. Here are those consequences:

The “2016 Global Emotions Report” by Gallup, surveying over a thousand people in each one of 140 different nations, found that, by far, the people in Syria had “the lowest positive experiences worldwide,” the people there were far more miserable than in any other nation. The score was 36 (on a scale to 100). Second and third worst were tied at 51: Turkey because of the tightening dictatorship there as Turkey has become one of Obama’s key allies in toppling Assad; Nepal, on account of the earthquake. Then tied at 54, were three countries, the fourth, fifth, and sixth, most-miserable places to live: Georgia, which still hasn’t recovered from the U.S.-backed wars against Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where the majority want to be part of Russia; Serbia, where the majority are opposed to the government’s move to enter NATO; and Iraq, which still hasn’t recovered from Bush’s 2003 invasion. Then tied at 55, are five countries, the seventh-through-eleventh-most-miserable nations: Yemen, where America’s ally the Sauds are dropping American bombs onto Shiite neighborhoods; Bosnia and Herzegovina, which still hasn’t recovered from the civil war and the U.S. bombing; Lithuania, which became impoverished by IMF-imposition of economic austerity, which has prevented economic recovery; Belarus, which will probably be the last country in the world to break away from Marxism; and, finally, the 11th-worst, Ukraine, which prior to the U.S. coup, was less miserable than 29 countries and had a score of 60, which was 5 points higher than today’s — Obama’s coup there has definitely immiserated the Ukrainian people (not to mention displaced millions and slaughtered thousands by the ethnic-cleansing campaign against residents of the former Donbass region of Ukraine).

To what extent would it be sincere, or even honest, then, for the U.S. President to say this?:

America’s willingness to apply force around the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos, and America’s failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future. … In Ukraine, Russia’s recent actions recall the days when Soviet tanks rolled into Eastern Europe. But this isn’t the Cold War. Our ability to shape world opinion helped isolate Russia right away. Because of American leadership, the world immediately condemned Russian actions; Europe and the G7 joined us to impose sanctions; NATO reinforced our commitment to Eastern European allies; the IMF is helping to stabilize Ukraine’s economy; OSCE monitors brought the eyes of the world to unstable parts of Ukraine. And this mobilization of world opinion and international institutions served as a counterweight to Russian propaganda and Russian troops on the border and armed militias in ski masks.

Those “armed militias in ski masks,” incidentally, were U.S.-CIA-hired mercenaries. He had to know that; he simply lied.

In the U.S. Presidential contest this year, the big foreign-affairs issue that separates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump on one side, and all of the other candidates on the other, is whether to prioritize killing jihadists, above defeating Assad and any other ally of Russia. Both Sanders and Trump say that killing jihadists is definitely the top priority. Hillary Clinton and the other Republicans say that both priorities are equal and must be pursued with equal vigor, even though that will mean helping the jihadists whenever they’re causing damage to Russia or to Russia’s allies — such as to Assad in Syria. Judging Obama by his actions not his (lying) words, he’s on the side of Clinton and the other (the self-acknowledged) Republicans. The reality is that anyone (such as Clinton, Cruz, and Kasich) who says that both priorities are equal, is really in favor of placing the defeat of Russia as being a higher priority than killing jihadists — but for political reasons can’t afford to admit it publicly. Those candidates are actually the candidates who (like the Bushes and the Clintons) represent the Saud family, who financed Al Qaeda before 9/11, and who continued doing it after 9/11, and whose friends the other Arabic royal families, are financing the other jihadist organizations.

On the one side in this ongoing international war are Russia and its few allies, which include the Shiites, both the secular Assad in Syria, and the fundamentalist Khamenei in Iran; and, on the other side are the United States and its many allies, which include the fundamentalist Sunni royal families, which own Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman, but which also include the fundamentalist Sunni, Tayyip Erdogan, in Turkey, who is the Saud family’s agent in the U.S.-led NATO anti-Russian military club. And, of course, NATO and Japan are also on the American team. And so is Israel.

This is geopolitics, the contest for power between the two blocs of aristocracies — the U.S.-Saudi-led bloc on the one side, versus the much smaller Russia-led bloc on the other.

Here is how Brzezinski put it, on page 46 of his classic 1997 statement of the position of the U.S.-Saudi-led bloc, in his book The Grand Chessboard, where he was discussing specifically Ukraine, and also explaining why the West must support the fundamentalist Sunni, or jihadist, groups that threaten to break up and thus weaken or destroy Russia:

Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south. … However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.

Brzezinski was born a Polish nobleman, to a family who were dispossessed by Russians, and he never lost his hatred of Russians. In 1973, he and his friend David Rockefeller (like the Arabic royals a hereditary oil-billionaire) founded the Trilateral Commission, to coordinate America and Europe and Japan, so as to conquer Russia by breaking it up — classic divide-and-conquer aristocratic thinking. That’s what his Grand Chessboard is all about: conquest, for global dominance. To understand not only Obama but the Bushes, and the Clintons, that book is the classic. And the reason why the American aristocracy loathes both Sanders and Trump — different though those two candidates are — is that both candidates present the first possibility since the end of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in 1991 to end the purely aristocratic war that has continued on since then (with the public financing it via their taxes, and providing the corpses for it in Libya, Ukraine, Syria, and a few other places) to conquer Russia.

Obama is an extraordinarily gifted politician, notwithstanding any deficiencies he has as a national leader, and so here was from his brief exchange (and there was no follow-up on this question) dealing with his biggest achievement and his biggest error as President, speaking with Chris Wallace of Fox News and telecast on April 10th:

WALLACE: Worst mistake?

OBAMA: Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.

But, even without any follow-up question, that actually says a lot: it says that, though Obama didn’t even “plan for the day after” (a shocking admission, which really shows the abysmal caliber of the man), his bombing Libya till Muammar Gaddafi was killed “was the right thing to do.” (George W. Bush feels the same about his having gotten rid of another Russia-ally, Saddam Hussein.) And, of course, the unasked question there was: Why? Why was it “the right thing to do”? But, if his foreign policy is driven obsessively by the goal of taking down the leader of any nation who is friendly toward Russia, then it does make sense, after all — the same sense as what Obama also did to Yanukovych in Ukraine, and is still so persistently trying to do to Assad in Syria. (And Chris Wallace’s having not even noticed that he had, just then, elicited from Obama the most shocking statement in Obama’s entire Presidency, showed that that TV network of psychopaths was functioning true-to-form — the interviewer didn’t even care that the U.S. President had perpetrated a huge bombing campaign without even concerning himself about what the consequences would be — other than to get rid of a leader who was friendly to Russia, which Obama wouldn’t have admitted as his goal, even if it was true.)

And, as regards America’s future international relations, the continuance (or not) of this psychopathic goal, is the top issue in the current U.S. Presidential campaign. Whereas the American public don’t even think much about it, America’s billionaires certainly do, which is why they’re pouring billions into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and the other candidates who want to continue that goal (taking control of Russia), but with even more intensity than Obama has been doing.

Properly understood, history isn’t only about the past; it is, far more importantly, about the future. That’s why the aristocracy don’t finance the careers of truthful historians: the public are supposed to believe the myths, which have been shaped by the aristocracy in the past. Truthful history would endanger the aristocracy. And that’s why the public aren’t supposed to know such things as, “Why Obama Prioritizes Ousting Assad Over Defeating Syria’s Jihadists,” nor even to know that he does. But, he does; and here has been provided an explanation as to why he does (and understanding why, will pose an even greater threat to the aristocracy — which is why few media will publish this).

The con isn’t supposed to be known; or, if it’s known, it’s not supposed to be noticed.

OBAMA: Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.

And that’s also the reason “Why Obama Prioritizes Ousting Assad Over Defeating Syria’s Jihadists.” He says: doing it in Libya was his “worst mistake.” But he cares so little, that he’s trying to do it again, in Syria. He’s true-to-form, for a psychopath.

And this answers the question, as well as it can be answered. It’s not a matter of corpses, and bloodshed, and immiserated nations, to him; it’s “The Grand Chessboard.” He simply wants to be the person at the mountaintop, even if it’s a mountain of corpses. Or, maybe, especially if it’s a mountain of corpses. This has been the way of aristocracies for thousands of years, and he’s a natural at it. Just a natural. Especially since the CIA has been aiming since at least 1957 to overthrow the Ba’ath Party as Syria’s leadership, and to replace them with a partitioned Syria, whose key oil-and-gas pipeline route would be controlled by a fundamentalist-Sunni ally of the Sauds.

After all, the Grand Chessboard may be just a game, but it can be a very profitable one, for the right people.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

"Life begets life, making Earth livable." — Dr. Glen Barry

Not much new land is being made, yet land’s well-being is central to the well-being of human and all life. On land, in a miraculous act of biological emergence, plants and animals have naturally evolved and self-organized to form ecosystems and ultimately the biosphere. Yet existing land and its ecology have been treated incautiously and with great malice for centuries.

Land ensconced in natural vegetation is the living membrane that encompasses Earth and mediates energy and material flows between air and water. Naturally evolved terrestrial ecosystems are a majestic miracle, provider of life, and humanity’s habitat home. Over countless eons pulsing lifeforms emerge and radiate creating the panoply of a living Earth.

Life begets life, making Earth livable.

The history of natural land destruction is largely synonymous with human settlements and agriculture. The disease of ecological colonialism radiated from Europe, utterly decimating land and its productive capacity globally. As the myth of a perpetual growth economy has been universally embraced; about 90% of Earth’s original old-growth forests have been pillaged, 50% of top soil has been lost, and about half of global land cover no longer remains in a natural condition.

The global ecological system has percolated from a state of human settlements enmeshed within a sea of life-giving natural ecosystems, to a sea of unnatural human endeavors surrounding islands of nature. Such ecological overshoot is not sustainable and this terrestrial ecosystem loss is collapsing our one shared biosphere.

Rarely has a species gone so rogue and utterly lost their place within the natural world.

The alleged history of human progress is in fact a litany of ecocidal land abuses. The way industrial humans have treated land is hideous and devoid of ethics. We probe, cut, mine, burn, till, and otherwise desecrate billion year old naturally evolved wonders to make single use consumer junk, to amongst other things, wipe our asses of crap. Soil is sterilized and loses it structure as natural vegetation is lost and industrial agriculture creates sterile monocultures in their stead.

The fires raging across Alberta, Canada, epitomize the violence being waged upon ecology, and show the consequences of sick land. Clear-cutting ancient old-growth boreal forests to mine the sand for filthy tar oil, which when burnt changes atmospheric chemistry, signals the culmination of the death wish inherent in Western thought’s embrace of the myth of endless growth.

Rarely is there such clarity that humans have lost sight of their place within ecology, and utterly failed to sustain natural capital upon which their well-being depends. Yet if we accepted that ecology is the meaning of life, and went back to the land, it is possible this decline could be stopped and reversed.

Gaia’s regenerative capacity is impressive, but not infallible. Never has the Earth had to respond to the rise of over 7 billion super-predators, each determined to out consume the other. Such was the history of life post glacier and volcano, and on at least five occasions life has recovered from mass extinction, recovering from such calamities as asteroid hits.

Yet evolution is neither purposeful nor guaranteed. Earth’s uninterrupted 3.5 billion year progression of ever greater ecological complexity has not faced simultaneous abrupt climate change, introduction of novel toxic compounds, and an unprecedented and unrelenting assault upon natural ecosystems of the scale waged by humanity before.

Humanity’s last great hope is that we go back to the land as we embrace ecology ethics.

Thanks to relatively long lag times, even after vegetation is desecrated, an echo of their ecological splendor lives on within fragmented remnants. Albeit tattered and torn, much remains that if given the opportunity can regenerate and expand.

But we have to move fast, and can’t wait as spiraling ecological simplification of quivering remnants continues apace. There is much that can be done to take pressure off the land and areas adjacent to remnants to harness natural regeneration patterns. And there exists great potential to go back to land in terms of nurturing and in many cases leaving untouched Gaia’s natural capital.

Firstly all remaining primary vegetation must be protected in global biosphere preservation zones. Old-growth forest logging must end, and logging in naturally regenerating forests be sharply curtailed. These forests and other natural vegetation provide the blueprint and genetic materials for the coming age of Ecological Restoration.

Those greenwashing old-growth forest logging, falsely claiming it is sustainable as they gorge on foundation money, are guilty of a great crime against Earth and her species. They must be stopped.

Simultaneously we must move to ecologically recover degraded lands. Restoration ecology is the science of returning land to its natural condition. In some cases it can be as simple as allowing remnants to expand naturally by ensuring the development pressures are taken off adjacent denuded lands. It other cases it may include carrying out plantings to augment natural restoration, particularly seeking to reestablish the ecologically dominant species that provide the context for all the others. Potential exists for non-toxic polycultures of native tree species to be planted as part of a broader ecosystem restoration effort in order to provide forest products.

As the greatest abuser of land, industrial agriculture must be abandoned. Petroleum intensive means of growing food cannot last long, and we must return to local means of organic food production. One of the most exciting innovations to emerge in land care is the rise of permaculture, as boundaries between traditional intensive gardens and forests increasingly blur. Forest gardens intermingled within old-growth forests have tremendous potential for perpetual advancement.

This essay calls for each of us to go back to the land to the extent our current situation allows. Begin by buying local, organic food; eating less or no meat; and progress to growing as much of your own food as possible. Work to protect and restore natural vegetation both on land to which you may have access and supporting the work of others doing so globally. Buy some land and restore it, or join (or establish) a community garden. Gather, collect, trade, and plant seeds; establishing nurseries of native plant materials for ecological restoration, permaculture, and organic gardening.

Remember to lie down upon the land, looking at the clouds; to feel at one with and savor contact with nature’s plants and animals, and to hug a tree when the urge arises.

One of the primary components of the coming Great Ecological Transition will be going back to the land to reverse ecological fragmentation and once again place humanity within the context of surrounding healthy land. Along with ending fossil fuels, limiting human population and inequity, and military demobilization; going back to the land is a requirement for a peaceful, just, and fair human future on a living Earth that can last forever.

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

And there we are. The final result of this exercise is, I think, to frame the transition as a "mind-sized" model (to use a term coined by Seymour Papert). Basically, it turns out that, barring technological miracles, a smooth transition from fossils to renewables is probably impossible; simply because the current way of seeing humankind's problems makes it impossible even to conceive such a massive shift of investments as it would be needed (noting also that investments in renewables have not been significantly increasing from 2011 - that's bad).

Life’s purpose is to multiply and increase its scope wherever it can. The population of individual species are maintained and controlled by a combination of mainly cooperative and competitive interactions. Competition is wasteful and destructive; therefore, it’s avoided and is an indirect motivation for the multitude of species and the wide range that life covers. It’s what has enable life to be always in a process of changing to a balanced state for an average best condition for itself. Life therefore ventures in all direction to find a foothold.

The appearance of an upright postured ape with hands that could then carry and do things necessitated and supported an expanding brain that could usefully use hands that gradually moved its thump to oppose its fingers. Brain size always follows the ability to manipulate otherwise it’s a waste of energy. That chance coincidence of an animal that had hands like apes and gradually stood upright to walk took a few million years to evolve into modern people. It gave us an unchallengeable advantage over other life, a feat never attained before. Nevertheless, hunter-gatherers in the main manage to control their reproduction to be in balance with their local resources.

So we kept on populating by spreading all over the planet, which coincided with global warming, that ended the ice age, however, people weren’t responsible for that warming. The change in the climate raised the oceans by a global sea level of more than 120 metres, drowning land, as the vast ice sheets of the last Ice Age melted back. This melt-back lasted from about 19,000 to about 6,000 years ago, meaning that the average rate of sea-level rise was roughly 1 metre per century. It’s hard to imagine the turmoil that loss of land created, it left very few options but to grow one’s food if they were on fertile land that had enough rain or other water source.

Agriculture led to private property and the domination of nature

Agriculture introduced the separation of people from other life, which gave us this exceptionalism ideology to justify the exploitation of other life forms and ourselves. But its private property that agriculture gave us that changed the way we think and interact within ourselves, other life, and the physical world. For the first time in human history food, artefact, and people could be stolen as they are now private property and depending on the resources of the area those stolen people became the slave of agricultural societies. It produced statuses, hierarchy, and organised thievery of land, produce, and people that we maintained to this day in a variety of forms.

The competition for property, which includes land, people, and anything, that’s regarded of value, is a strong motivator for an insatiable need for even more stuff and people. That growth in produce and people needed specialisation that’s slaves to do the hack work, tradesman, oversees, and so on the ladder of domination. Life in cities is the outcome, which we call civilisation.

The glory of civilisation

Civilisation’s purpose and therefore its makeup are to facilitate the fewest number of individuals to control the largest number of people to extract the maximum wealth from the riches resource on the vastest area of land. How that’s accomplished depend on the location, the level of technology achieved, and the history of that society, its ecology, and the climate that it functions in. The result since the use of fossil fuels is reaching catastrophic proportions.

There’s more than enough evidence of the impossible life our young ones will face due to the unwillingness, mainly from journalist, the highly educated, the economist, and warriors to face up to the falsehoods that established civilisation. Also the pretence that democratic governments represent its people when the information they get is to maintain a system that uses people to take far more from nature than it gives to nature until its completely drained. Worst still, it’s an economy that not only must grow its population and commerce infinitely, but it’s our master. The economy demands more people and trade.

The available information on the state of our planet is overwhelmingly depressing. Yet we don’t show the concern for today’s young’s future when they will be living on a much degraded planet because of our need to satisfy the system of economics and population growth. Billionaires and their lackeys have deceived themselves in thinking that they would be immune, as it would only be that multitude of losers that would perish. Even the most concerned atmospheric scientist can only think within the civilised capitalist system, it’s our culture we know no other, but it’s our culture of more, that is destroying our planet- the life of present children’s future.

How we overcame famines by sacrificing future life

England spearheaded the energy from fossil fuel, which led to overpopulate Europe that produced the mass migration. The steam engine, particularly James Watt’s engine took England off its complete dependence on solar energy from plants and those plants to feed animals including less fortunate people, also wind, and water power as they have a large component of solar energy. A little later with George Stevenson’s locomotive, which made travel a possibility for every one and it brought goods where it was needed. This should have equalised life and increased economic security, but under that civilised economic system it expanded the disparity in wealth and health. But worst still instead of giving a better and easier life the extra energy was used to increase the population and help the powerful to conquer the world.

The use of coal to heat water to produce a variation in the pressure of the steam to that of the atmosphere to do work was the major instigator in establishing the basic of science, which’s thermodynamics. The adherence to it, when convenient within a capitalist economy, has produced our modern world of science, which enabled that economy to grossly overpopulate nations.

We mustn’t take more from nature than it can sustain, but within that limit we can have a very large population with a small foot print from individuals or fewer people with a larger footprint. There is a limit to how large societies’ footprint can be and a limit to the fewest people we can have for a sustainable life. The obvious safest size population to have on the planet would be the one to ensure the best life our children can have in a sustainable manner. It could be a population of less than two billion people, which would give us all a very comfortable sustainable and safe life. That, sustainable way of life, can’t be attained in our civilised capitalist world no matter how much we revere civilisation, it on the other hand, is bringing life to the brink of our extinction. A system that’s geared to grow can’t reduce our population, or our consumption and we are wasting valuable time expecting any progress in that line. We don’t have any other choice but to abandon that socioeconomic system if our children are to survive.

To survive, we must unlock our social genetic makeup

To reduce to that sort of population and with a comparative tiny economy, we would need a very different socioeconomic way of life to be able to cope with such drastic measures and give us all a better life. The social life that our hunter-gatherers forebear had is a good model of socialness of the highest order, but only seen last century in a few harsh areas where competition was unknown. They lived in very social groups of cooperative people of a population that their environment could easily sustain safely. The security attained in those societies, especially for children, is impossible for civilised people to imagine. Children like adults would belong to the group, who are all responsible for each other, when able. That meant a child would have multiple mothers and siblings of older and younger age helping each other. Our biggest obstacle to that life is our mind set, not the numbers of people or our technical reliance.

We need a way of life that can give a satisfying live to everyone at the same time as we have a reduction in population and consumption per capita. Doing that would make life easier, as there would be more houses without building more, we would have more choice of where to live and grow our food in the best areas.

The joy of children is not diminished by sharing them, but any stress of nurturing children is reduced by sharing that responsibility. Also, all children would grow up in fair societies because they would all have the same multiple mothers and fathers and would experience the same age position as they grew up. Loneliness for young and old could then be a thing of the past. But this set up can’t function well in an alien milieu of capitalism; nevertheless, it’s our original way of life that our hunter-gatherers live for million years. Our gens are still oriented for social living it’s our way of life the contradiction is adopting private property as our master.

Economic competitiveness of wealth is very different to competitive tennis, as winning a game doesn’t place that player in a stronger position for the next game. Competition for wealth is extremely unfair and dishonest as winning the first round increases the winner’s position for the second go. It’s more like martial arts where a severe blow to one participant makes the contest unequal; it’s like the competitive economy. The game is to annihilate opponents. Striving for equal opportunity in a competitive based economy is divisive, unfair and dishonest. As chance and location can give an advantage that can easily grow and those who have gained that advantage can’t see the need to share fairly. So they will not relinquish their privilege to attain fairness in society. On the other hand, by increasing the awareness of societies wealthiest to the disaster they are also facing, and that, their only saving strategy is to unite people in a drastic reduction in output, consumption, and babies, which will enable everyone to survive. To strive for fairness because it’s the right way to live is utopian, but we must have fairness to survive, and that can unify us all, as survival is the primary instinct for all life. Starting that journey will also give us more than survival; it will start us on the way to have an assured and satisfying life.

With a reduction in the need for private property, we would also see a lessening importance of inheritances, a major unfairness of civilisation. Without the need to compete for position and stuff we can have an increasing cooperative society that involve participation instead of compulsion in a world where life is safe and secure - to venture- able to take challenges.

This piece follows my previous one “Value Our Children, Instead Of Money” .htm as it deals with our genetic makeup of a highly social and adaptable people. So that the less important money-private property is the less dishonesty we will have because we will be able to see that there’s little advantage being dishonest, even for sociopathy.

Lionel Anet is a member of Sydney U3A University of the Third Age, of 20 years standing and now a life member

America's extractive economy

Our movement has done incredible things over the past few years. We have built more power for climate justice on college campuses than any campaign before us. We’ve mobilized thousands of students, shifted popular opinion about the fossil fuel industry by running strong campaigns and populated today’s movements with a new generation of organizers. This is incredible work and we should be proud of ourselves. We also know that we have more work to do.

Iliana Salazar-Dodge leads the youth contingent of the People's Climate March, September, 2014. (photo credit: Yong Jung Cho)

Australian Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters said the landmark "should act as a global wake-up call and must shock both Australian big political parties out of their blind coal-obsession which is literally cooking our planet and our Great Barrier Reef."

The Obama administration has released a major new report on how manmade global warming is making Americans sicker—and it's only going to get worse.

Developed over three years and involving approximately 100 climate and public health experts, the 332-page report was based on more than 1,800 published scientific studies and new federal research, and was reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences.

The report, titled The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States, "significantly advances what we know about the impacts of climate change on public health, and the confidence with which we know it," according to a White House fact sheet about the report.

"As the climate continues to change, the risks to human health will grow, exacerbating existing health threats and creating new public health challenges, and impacting more people in more places," the fact sheet states. "From children to the elderly, every American is vulnerable to the health impacts associated with climate change, now and in the future."

The report also involved the participation of representatives from a number of federal departments and agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Defense and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.

"It's not just about polar bears and melting ice caps," said EPA administrator Gina McCarthy at a White House event unveiling the report. "It's about our families. It's about our future."

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that climate change affects more people in more ways than doctors are accustomed to seeing. Noting that the report will help doctors to quantify "the sheer number of pathways through which climate affects health," Murthy called out increased pollen, wildfire and air pollution exacerbated by emissions from power plants as emergent climate change-related threats to public health.

Here are nine ways global warming increases health risks.

1. Increased asthma and respiratory illness.

The report projects that by 2030, due to “future ozone-related human health impacts attributable to climate change,” the United States can expect to see hundreds or even thousands of premature deaths, not to mention increases in hospital admissions and cases of acute respiratory illnesses every single year.

The report underscores the particular impact on children. Due to their immature respiratory and immune systems, kids can expect to experience more episodes of asthma and other adverse respiratory effects due to climate change. "Not being able to breathe is one of the most frightening experiences" a person can have, Surgeon General Murthy said. "We're talking about scary moments for parents and children."

An estimated five million children in the U.S. currently suffer from asthma, the most common chronic disease among children, According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, “asthma is the number one reason that children miss school, go to emergency rooms, and are admitted to hospitals.”

"Now we're seeing [asthma] worsening because of the heat, the allergens [and air pollution],” said Lynn Goldman, dean of the George Washington University's public health school.

2. Worsening allergies.

Every spring, flowers bloom and with them, pollen spores are spread throughout the air, increasing allergies. With warming temperatures ushered in by climate change, the pollen season has lengthened, exacerbating the symptoms of hay fever for an estimated 40 million Americans who suffer from allergies, triggering annual healthcare costs of more than $21 billion.

Between 1995 and 2011 in central North America, the ragweed pollen season has increased by as much as 11 to 27 days. That has already had significant impacts on some 6.8 million kids who are susceptible to allergens.

3. Premature deaths from extreme heat.

White House science adviser John Holdren underscored the looming threat of increased heat waves, warning that greenhouse gas reductions at this point won't stop fatalities caused by increased temperatures. "We can see thousands to tens of thousands of heat-related deaths in the United States each summer," he warned.

These premature deaths are expected to outpace projected deaths due to extreme cold. The western part of the country, in particular, will experience an increase in both the frequency and intensity of heat waves. Using a 1990 baseline for more than 200 U.S. cities, one model projected an increase of more than 11,000 additional deaths during the summer in 2030, rising to 27,000 more deaths by the summer of 2100.

4. More cases of Lyme disease.

Between 2001 and 2014, both the distribution and the number of reported cases of Lyme disease increased in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The number is set to increase as warmer temperatures impact both the winter and spring months, leading to an earlier annual onset of the Borrelia bacteria that causes the disease. Research indicates that the geographical distribution of ticks carrying the bacteria is “expected to expand to higher latitudes and elevations in the future.”

This figure provides 10-year estimates of fatalities related to extreme events from 2004 to 2013, as well as estimated economic damages from 58 weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion. These statistics are indicative of the human and economic costs of extreme weather events over this time period. Climate change will alter the frequency, intensity, and geographic distribution of some of these extremes, which has consequences for exposure to health risks from extreme events. (text and image: GlobalChange.gov)

Preparation for the future are in the works, but will it be enough?

While the report paints a bleak picture of the future health of American citizens, it also provides an opportunity and impetus to combat the threats posed by climate change. The Obama administration announced the following actions that respond to the challenges outlined by the Climate and Health Assessment:

A Climate Change Concept Image. Landscape of a green grass and drought land. Woman in green dress walking through an opened field
Photo Credit: pathdoc/Shutterstock

Homo sapiens means "wise person." But considering our behaviors that are putting the Earth's ecosystems at risk, we haven't been very wise at all. Every single day, many of our personal choices and individual actions negatively impact the environment in myriad ways. From turning on a light switch to throwing away a plastic bottle to having a hamburger, even the most mundane actions have a cumulative negative effect on the Big Blue Marble—the home we share with countless other Earthlings.

Think about that brand-new plastic bag you took home today from the store. That bag can take up to 1,000 years to fully decompose. And if it doesn't end up in a landfill, it could end up in the ocean and in the stomach of a fish, bird or dolphin—a fatal occurence that happens all the time. In China, a staggering 3 billion new plastic bags enter into circulation every single day. The Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive swirling collection of plastic trash in the North Pacific Ocean, is estimated to be anywhere from 270,000 square miles (about the size of Texas) to more than 5,800,000 square miles (up to 8 percent the size of the entire Pacific Ocean).

With all the ways we affect the health of the planet, it’s hard to know exactly what changes might have the greatest impact. Plus, every person is different. Some people drive every day, while others are rarely behind the wheel. Some of us love to buy stuff; others tend to be minimalist.

Taking into account these variations, here are three of the most environmentally damaging things you probably do that you might be able to change. If you’re truly interested in reducing your impact on the environment—and helping future generations of Earthlings have a better chance of surviving with the planet’s rapidly dwindling resources—these recommendations should be high on your to-do (or rather, not-do) list.

1. Eat less meat or stop eating meat.

It’s difficult to overstate the massive negative impact the meat industry has on the environment. According to a staggering report published by the Worldwatch Institute, more than half of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture. It's no coincidence that the carbon footprint of the average meat eater is larger than that of a vegetarian by around 1.5 tons of CO2.

Beef produces a total of 30kg of greenhouse gas (GHG) per kg of food, while carrots, potatoes and rice produce 0.42, 0.45 and 1.3 kg GHG per kg of food, respectively. No wonder the United Nations said a global shift toward eating less meat is necessary to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

Keeping an animal alive is also resource intensive. Approximately 1,850 gallons of water are needed to produce a single pound of beef. Conversely, only 39 gallons are required to produce a pound of vegetables.

The meat industry also maintains society’s dependence on fossil fuels. Approximately 25 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy is required to produce 1 kilocalorie of all meat-based protein. But only 2.2 kilocalories of fossil fuel input is needed to produce 1 kilocalorie of grain-based protein.

The vast majority of us are meat-eaters. In the United States, only 3.2 percent of adults, or a little over 7 million people, follow a vegetarian-based diet. That leaves the rest—more than 97 percent—of Americans who include meat as a regular part of their diet.

So is it crazy to think that people would ever stop eating meat? One of the arguments meat-eaters commonly make is that humans need meat, that it’s a necessary part of a healthy diet. But that’s simply not true. Nutritionist Julieanna Hever sets the record straight:

A popular misconception is that animal products are the best source of protein. One important reason this myth has been perpetuated is because the amino acids—the building blocks of protein—are assembled in a way in animal foods that more closely resembles what humans actually utilize. However, we now know that this is inconsequential. When you consume any protein, it is broken down via digestion into its separate amino acid constituents and is pooled in the blood for further use. When the body needs to construct a protein for an enzyme or to repair muscles tissue, it collects the necessary amino acids and strings them back together in the sequence appropriate for what it is currently creating. This occurs regardless whether you consume animal or plant protein.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Recommended Daily Allowance of protein for adult men and women is 0.7 grams for every kilogram (about 2 pounds) of body weight. So an average 130-pound female should be consuming 46 grams of protein per day. A 170-pound male needs 62 grams.

Hever also points out that though we only need 10 percent of our caloric intake to be protein, we’re also generally eating too much protein, which is bad for our health:

Many people are consuming approximately 20 to 30 percent of their calories from protein, which equals 90 to 135 grams of protein on an 1,800-calorie diet (typical female intake) and 125 to 188 grams of protein on a 2,500-calorie diet (average male intake). This is equivalent to two to three times more than the USDA recommendations. Much of this excess protein comes from animal sources, which may be particularly damaging. Excess protein taxes the kidneys, contributes to gout, and is associated with an increased risk for many chronic diseases.

The U.S. addiction to meat is intense: Americans eat nearly four times as much meat as the global average. It may be tasty, but from a health standpoint, every last bloody morsel is unnecessary. “Whole plant foods, as provided in nature,” Hever says, “offer the ideal amount of protein necessary for growth, maintenance and functioning of metabolic processes.”

Many of today’s top performing athletes would agree with her assessment. Take mixed martial artist Nate Diaz, one of the top UFC fighters, an elite class of athletes. Diaz is a raw vegan, and he recently upset featherweight champion Conor McGregor—a meat eater. In fact, the list of so-called ultimate fighters who are switching to a vegan diet strictly for performance reasons is growing.

Eating vegetables over meat is healthier, leads to higher physical performance, is good for the planet and it’s also more ethical, as it avoids the killing of intelligent animals. In many ways, moving away from carnivorism toward veganism is a more evolved, more enlightened state of being.

Cutting out meat one day a week could be a good way to start. “Going meatless once a week may reduce your risk of chronic preventable conditions like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity,” notes the Meatless Monday website. “And going meatless once a week can also help reduce our carbon footprint and save precious resources like fossil fuels and fresh water.”

If you’re still not convinced that taking meat off your menu—or at least reducing your consumption of it—is one of the most important things you can do for the planet’s health, maybe the man whose name is synonymous with genius might push you over the edge. Albert Einstein once said, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

2. Have fewer kids or no kids.

This one is a no-brainer. Pretty much all of the anthropogenic, or human-caused environmental maladies the Earth is undergoing would be less intense if there were fewer people—in the end, it’s a numbers game. Climate change, species extinction, deforestation, ocean acidification, air pollution, spread of disease, destructive farming practices, pesticide overuse, resource depletion—the intensity of all these crises is directly tied to human overpopulation. Martin Luther King Jr., was aware of how problematic our species’ rapid multiplication is, calling overpopulation “the modern plague.”

The United Nations warns: “Rapidly increasing population exacerbates existing problems, such as transnational crime, economic interdependency, climate change, the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS and various other pandemics, and such social issues as gender equality, reproductive health, safe motherhood, human rights, emergency situations, and so much more.”

Take water, the most important resource for carbon-based life after air. Though three-fourths of the planet is covered in water, less than 1 percent of it is readily accessible freshwater that is available for human use. But by 2025, when the population reaches 8.1 billion, more than half the world’s people will face water-based vulnerability as demand for available freshwater reaches 70 percent. And while it may feel like rain just appears out of the blue, the Earth is a closed-loop system. Thus water, at least for the foreseeable future, is a finite resource.

Keeping the human population to an acceptable rate of growth isn’t just about helping the environment, it’s about helping humans survive. As Roger Bengston, a founding board member of World Population Balance, puts it, “The point of population stabilization is to reduce".

In 1992, 1,700 of the world's leading scientists, spanning 70 countries and including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, issued a global appeal to limit population growth. In their “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” they write:

Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth.

The warning was spearheaded by Nobel laureate Henry W. Kendall, former chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. He described our precarious situation bluntly: “If we don't halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature, brutally and without pity, and will leave a ravaged world.”

Getting the population growth rate to stop skyrocketing into an increasingly overcrowded future is no small task. Doing it through official governmental channels, as China did in the late '70s when it launched its one-child policy (which it recently upped to two children), opens up a Pandora’s box.

Robert Engelman, president of the Worldwatch Institute, has a better idea: Put the decision in the hands of women. In his book State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity, he lays out a series of initiatives, including access to contraception, guaranteed secondary school education and the eradication of gender bias “from law, economic opportunity, health and culture,” which he argues will ensure a decline in the birthrate (with a goal of stopping short of 9 billion), solely based on a woman’s intention to have smaller families or even no children.

“Unsustainable population growth can only be effectively and ethically addressed by empowering women to become pregnant only when they themselves choose to do so,” Engelman writes.

Philip Njuguna, a pastor in Nairobi, Kenya, puts it more plainly: “When the family is small, whatever little they have they are able to share. There is peace.”

That’s good advice, particularly in impoverished and populous countries where the sheer number of people puts an unrelenting pressure on limited resources. But that advice also applies to rich countries, whose citizens have much bigger carbon footprints. According to a 2009 Oregon State University study, "an extra child born to a woman in the United States ultimately increases her carbon legacy by an amount (9,441 metric tons) that is nearly seven times the analogous quantity for a woman in China (1,384 tons)."

The study found that having one less child would yield a long-term environmental benefit. "The carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environmentally sensitive practices people might employ their entire lives—things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs," writes OSU science writer David Stauth about his colleagues' study.

3. Fly less or don't fly at all.

In 2013, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote an article whose title neatly summed up one of our worst environmental behaviors: "

For many people reading this, air travel is their most serious environmental sin. One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person. The average American generates about 19 tons of carbon dioxide a year; the average European, 10. So if you take five long flights a year, they may well account for three-quarters of the emissions you create.

If you you live in an urban center like New York City, where driving is minimal and the housing of choice is small apartments, flying is most likely the biggest contributor to your carbon footprint.

In the large scheme of things, aviation is a fairly small industry, but it has a disproportionately big impact on the Earth's climate, accounting for somewhere between five and nine percent of the total impact human activity has on climate change. And its impact is going to grow, with air travel volume steadily increasing—and faster than fuel efficiency gains can compensate.

Canadian environmental activist David Suzuki points out that, compared to other modes of transport like driving a car or taking a train, flying has a much greater climate impact per unit of distance traveled. He writes:

Since 1990, CO2 emissions from international aviation have increased 83 percent. The aviation industry is expanding rapidly in part due to regulatory and taxing policies that do not reflect the true environmental costs of flying. "Cheap" fares may turn out to be costly in terms of climate change. ...

A special characteristic of aircraft emissions is that most of them are produced at cruising altitudes high in the atmosphere. Scientific studies have shown that these high-altitude emissions have a more harmful climate impact because they trigger a series of chemical reactions and atmospheric effects that have a net warming effect. The IPCC, for example, has estimated that the climate impact of aircraft is two to four times greater than the effect of their carbon dioxide emissions alone.

Nearly a decade ago, New York Times writer John Tierney put the impact of flying in terms of recycling plastic bottles. “To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger roundtrip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles” in coach (or up to 100,000 for business or first-class seats, adjusting for the additional space pricier seats take up). So if you’ve simply got to board a plane, sitting in coach is a much better environmental option. You can also purchase carbon offsets to reduce your air travel carbon footprint.

What else can you do?

Of course, there are many other things you can do, from not buying plastic water bottles to using cloth shopping bags to simply reducing the amount of stuff you buy. When it comes to consumption, the old adage “reduce, reuse, recycle” isn’t just a list—it’s a hierarchy. The most important thing you can do is reduce your consumption. If you have to consume, try to reuse something rather than buying it new. And if you have to buy it new, recycle it when you’re done.

We can’t all be a part of vegetarian, one-child families who never fly. But if we can all try to get a little closer to that ideal, it’ll be better for everybody—for all Earthlings, not just Homo sapiens. Maybe then we can finally start living up to our name.

[Editor's note: This article previously misstated Nate Diaz's first name as Nick. Nick Diaz is Nate's brother and fellow raw vegan mixed martial artist. Thanks to careful reader Ruben Gutierrez for noticing that error.]

In major East Coast cities, where land is sinking at the same time that seas are rising, an independent analysis by Climate Central shows that the rapid Antarctic melting described by the new modeling effort would push tide levels up by between five and six feet this century alone.

Climate Central’s analysis combined mid-range values from the new projections for Antarctic melting with previous mid-range projections regarding global sea level rise, along with local factors such as sinking that naturally occurs in some areas. It illuminated the dangerous collective impacts of the different ways that climate change is expected to affect sea levels.

If climate pollution is quickly and dramatically reined in, the analysis shows sea level rise in major East Coast cities, including New York, Boston and Baltimore, could be kept to less than two feet—which could nonetheless see developed stretches of shorelines regularly or permanently flooded.

Problems associated with sea level rise are expected to be worse in Louisiana, where stretches of land are being lost to erosion caused by flood control projects and gas and oil exploration. New Orleans could see more than seven feet of sea level rise by 2100, Climate Central’s analysis of the new findings showed.

West Coast cities would experience four to five feet of sea level rise by 2100, Climate Central found.

The new paper by Pollard and DeConto was received positively by sea level rise scientists. That contrasts with overwhelmingly skeptical responses to a recent apocalyptic scenario that was finalized and published last week by a team of researchers led by well-known scientist-turned-activist James Hansen.

Hansen’s 52-page academic treatise, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics following an unconventional peer review process, described a dystopian near-future in which climate change triggers superstorms and more than 10 feet of sea-level.

John Church, an Australian government scientist who specializes in sea level rise projections, cautioned that the experiments used to produce Wednesday’s paper were based on too few models to give him total confidence in the findings. But he said his “overall reaction” to the paper was “positive.”

“Yes, the projections are larger than previous estimates,” Church said. “But not in the unrealistic range like Hansen et al.”

The recent Hansen paper was a “worse-case scenario,” said NASA scientist Eric Rignot, one of its coauthors.

Rignot said the Antarctic study published Wednesday was “absolutely realistic.”

“I think it is setting up a new paradigm for sea level projections, because their numbers are much higher than those from traditional ice sheet models with incomplete or simplified physics,” Rignot said. “Once the ice shelves are gone, melted away, calving of big walls will be the dominant process of mass wastage. It is a great paper.”

To create the maps in this story, Climate Central adjusted existing local sea level rise projections to account for DeConto and Pollard's new findings​,​ rounded​ results​ to the nearest foot​, and took matching screenshots from our Surging Seas Risk Zone Map. We used local median sea level projections from Kopp et al. 2014 and replaced the Antarctic component with the average ​of the central projections​ from the two main scenarios in the new paper.

John Upton is a Senior Science Writer at Climate Central. He has written for the New York Times, Slate, Nautilus, VICE, Grist, Pacific Standard, Modern Farmer, 7x7 San Francisco and Audubon Magazine.

"Commercial overexploitation of the world's fish stocks is severe," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said back in 2012. "Many species have been hunted to fractions of their original populations. More than half of global fisheries are exhausted, and a further third are depleted."

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 85 percent of global fish stocks are "overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion."

To see more stories like this, visit "Planet or Profit?"

Yet despite these alarms having been sounded loud and clear, life in the oceans is continuing to deteriorate at an ominously rapid pace.

Total Collapse?

Fisheries for the most sought-after species of fish have already collapsed.

The populations of all large predator fish in the oceans have declined by 90 percent in the 50 years since modern industrial fishing became widespread around the world, according to a shocking paper by scientists with Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, published in Nature in 2003.

Three years after the paper's publication, the same scientists, along with colleagues from across the world, published an even more startling paper that predicted a total collapse of all fish that are currently caught commercially by 2048.

Many scientists, like Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, have estimated that the total fish catch for the planet peaked back in the mid-1980s, and has been declining ever since.

Most scientists studying the issue agree that the three primary causes of the crisis are overfishing, plastic pollution and anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD).

But several, like Dr. Simon Boxall, an associate professor of oceanography with the University of Southampton, singled out overfishing as the largest culprit.

"The big problem is that we are overfishing," Boxall told Truthout. "The [fisheries] management isn't working, and is in fact causing just as much destruction [as] if there was no management in the first place."

Dr. Maria Salta, a biological oceanographer and lecturer in environmental microbiology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Portsmouth, echoed this dire outlook on the state of the oceans.

"It is clear that if we continue like this, in a few years time, there is not going to be much left," she told Truthout, speaking about the impacts of ACD, pollution and overfishing. "We are losing species every day without ever knowing about them. Sometimes humans can be like a plague to the environment."

Fishing operations have expanded to, quite literally, every corner of the ocean over the last 100 years, due to the fact that technology now exists that enables humans to find and catch every single fish in the oceans, no matter where they are located on the planet.

Salta's statement might be startling to many, but ample scientific evidence exists to back it up. Overfishing is nothing more than taking wildlife from the sea at rates that are too high for the fished species to replace themselves. Atlantic cod and herring, along with California's sardines, were overfished to the brink of extinction by the 1950s, and by the late 20th century, isolated depletions had become both global and catastrophic.

Salta said sharks provide one example of this problem. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed approximately one-third of all open-ocean shark species as threatened with extinction because of overfishing.

"The oceanic white-tip shark populations declined by 99 percent from 1950 to 1999, making it now an endangered species," Salta said. "Also, when sharks are removed from the environment you change the balance of the ecosystem and how it functions."

According to the Pew Environment Group report "Protecting Life in the Sea," nearly one-third of the world supply of commercially caught fish has already collapsed.

Bycatch and Climate Disruption

Another major issue regarding overfishing is bycatch, which is sea life that is caught with the fish being collected in order to sell commercially, but is not used for any purpose.

Salta told Truthout she believes bycatch should be considered one of the ocean's biggest problems.

"From 1994 onwards, 27 million tons of bycatch are discarded every year," she said. "Thirty percent of marine catch is thrown overboard dead. For shrimpers, 80 percent of everything caught is bycatch and thrown back for dead. It is a mode of mass marine extinction."

Hence, bycatch combines with other issues, like ACD and pollution, to create a multipronged threat to life in the seas.

"If organisms drop out of the food chain, the entire ecosystem is impacted," she said. "And temperature affects biodiversity and fish stock. Changes in this variable can impact the entire ecosystem and impact fish stocks."

The intersecting effects of ACD should not be underestimated. As Salta pointed out, just mild fluctuations in water temperatures, which are now common due primarily to ACD, have dramatic impacts on fish and other marine life.

Boxall pointed to the North Sea cod fishery as an example of this.

"Those cod were overfished, but we also see climate change kicking in and warming the waters, and cod, which like a cooler climate, are being pushed further north," he told Truthout. "Our cod are migrating to Iceland."

It has now become common to see reports of mass displacements of fish due to water temperature changes caused by ACD.

According to a study published in late February, ACD is pushing fish toward both poles, which means that poorer countries near the equator have even less access to one of their primary food sources. The fish migrations are due to global temperature increases in the oceans.

ACD is also a culprit in causing marine diseases to spread, according to a recent report.

Studies show that warming waters in the oceans are promoting marine diseases, so infectious agents now have the potential to alter oceanic life in many different ways. On a global basis, salmon are now being attacked by the diseases, and increasing bacteria is present in oysters.

Coral Bleaching and Overfishing Persist

Dr. Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez is a biological oceanographer at the UK's National Oceanography Centre. She specializes in the study of how human impacts on the atmosphere are changing the chemistry of the oceans, and how this causes acidification. She emphasizes that ACD's role in lowering fish stocks must not be taken lightly.

Coral reefs rely on the calcification process to be constructed, and calcification is the process by which corals produce calcium carbonate.

"Calcifying organisms are essentially chalk-producing organisms, and when seawater becomes more alkaline, this is impacted negatively by dissolving them," Iglesias-Rodriguez told Truthout. "Calcification affects fisheries because many fishes' diet is based on these organisms. So this has food security impacts as well."

ecent research shows that coral growth is already being weakened by increasingly acidifying oceans. One-quarter of the carbon dioxide released as a result of human activities is absorbed into the world's oceans, where it alters their chemistry and reduces coral growth.

Meanwhile, a severe coral-bleaching event in the most pristine portions of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has caused authorities there to raise an alarm over severe local coral bleaching, caused by warm ocean temperatures.

Meanwhile, the overfishing issue persists.

Salta went so far as to warn that within the next 25 years, one-quarter of the planet's biodiversity is in danger of extinction due solely to commercial fishing.

"When fish become overfished, the human response is to fish down the species to smaller species, so this shifts the target group down, and this affects biodiversity and the ocean ecology," she said.

Another large problem associated directly with overfishing is the widespread use of trawling: a method of fishing that involves dragging a fishing net through the water behind a boat. Bottom trawling, when the fishing net drags across the seafloor, is particularly destructive.

"It's the equivalent of forest clear-cutting, but in the ocean, because when they trawl the entire bottom, whatever is there, is removed from the environment and changes the entire ecosystem," Salta said. "Biomass of the deep sea is in sharp decline because of trawling."

Salta believes the global commercial fishing industry is affecting evolution in the oceans by causing many fish species to mature earlier; which then causes them to grow to smaller overall sizes; which then causes female fish to produce smaller, poorer quality eggs; which then causes a negative feedback loop of evolution.

Mitigation?

All of these issues, taken together, reveal an overwhelming crisis. However, while it may be impossible to restore the oceans to their healthiest state, many scientists believe there is hope, at least, for mitigation.

Boxall says that process must involve humans changing the way we treat our seas -- immediately.

"The sea is over 73 percent of our world," he said. "The scale of it means that anyone actually trying to go out and clean them is not physically possible. We have to find ways to change our impacts, because we can't change what has been done already."

He says local solutions are key: They won't solve the whole crisis, but they can certainly have a positive impact.

"A sustainable fishery looks like an artisan fishery," he said. "Small vessels with small nets, catching what might be considered commercially unviable, is what we need. One hundred small boats would be better than one large factory ship that is scraping the seabed and taking everything out of an area. On small boats, after the sorting, much of it is alive when it goes back into the water."

However, specific changes in practices are just one component of addressing this crisis: Boxall stresses that without a broad shift in consciousness, nothing will change.

"Fishing as it's running at the moment isn't sustainable," he said. "The industry will collapse because there won't be fish to catch. But if we manage it properly now, and come to agreements driven by science and not commerce and politics, we'll have fisheries in the future."

Thus, he suggests we start thinking more about the need for an environmentally driven market, as opposed to a commercially driven market.

If such a shift were to happen on a large scale, it may be possible for some of the negative trends we are seeing today to be slowed -- or even halted altogether.

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009, and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last ten years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

April 22 is Earth Day 2016. Each Earth Day marks another milestone in a profound human reawakening to the truth that we are children of a living Earth who survive and prosper only as contributing members of a living Earth community.

The first Earth Day, in 1970, brought 20 million people to U.S. streets, parks, and auditoriums in a massive demonstration of public support for political action to limit human harm to nature. As the first mass demonstration in defense of nature, it marked the birth of the modern environmental movement. More than a billion people in 192 countries now participate in Earth Day each year.

The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring planted the seed. Prior to her book, the word “environment” rarely appeared in mainstream media. Silent Spring became a New York Times bestseller and drew worldwide attention to the devastating impact of our toxic wastes on human and animal health.

By 1970, environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute were working with key political leaders to draft landmark environmental legislation. The massive turnout on the first Earth Day demonstrated strong public demand for political action.

In response, Congress quickly authorized the Environmental Protection Agency and passed the Clean Air, Clean Water, Marine Mammal Protection, and Endangered Species Acts. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, signed them into law.

The second turning point quickly followed. In 1972, two seemingly unrelated events took the movement to a deeper level. The crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft photographed Earth from space. That image of Earth, a finite shining jewel suspended in the vastness of dark space, became one of the most iconic images in history.

That same year, scientists working in MIT’s Systems Development Lab, published the results of a computer simulation demonstrating that if human consumption continued to grow at current rates, critical Earth systems would begin to collapse early in the 21st century. A dry, technical Report to the Club of Rome, “The Limits to Growth,” sold 12 million copies in 37 languages, challenged the fundamental assumption of mainstream neoliberal economics that there is no limit to growth in material consumption, and seemed to set the stage for dramatic political action.

The corporate sector, recognizing a threat to profits, quickly mobilized to support the election of politicians loyal to the myth that growth in GDP and corporate profits holds the key to prosperity for all. It has prevailed for nearly four decades, with the support of academic economists who remain wedded to GDP growth as the economy’s defining purpose. The resulting cost to life and the human future is incalculable.

The economic, social, and environmental consequences of decades of flagrant abuse of corporate power at the expense of democracy, people, and the living Earth have provoked a massive political backlash. The current demand for deep change corresponds to an emerging third stage in humanity’s awakening environmental consciousness.

1. The first stage, provoked by the publication of Silent Spring, focused attention on the impact of industrial toxins on the health of humans and other animals.

2. The second stage, spurred by the image of Earth in space and MIT’s “The Limits to Growth,” introduced a planetary systems perspective.

3. The third stage features the voices of indigenous people whose traditions have long honored Earth as our living mother, of scientists who speak of Earth as a living superorganism that self-organizes to maintain the environmental conditions essential to life, and of religious leaders, such as Pope Francis, who opened his “Care of the Earth” encyclical with a reference to Mother Earth.

Those of us who succumbed to the false promises of Western consumerism at great cost to our Earth mother, our living Earth family, and ourselves, are Earth’s prodigal children now returning home.

We have only begun, however, to confront the implications for how we must now learn to live. This Earth Day let us share and celebrate the possibilities.

David is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, president of the Living Economies Forum, and a member of the Club of Rome. He holds MBA and PhD degrees from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School.

Due to the rapid disappearance of many of Earth’s creatures, the National Geographic Photo Ark seeks to document every animal in captivity. The Ark also focuses on funding on-the-ground conservation projects for prioritized species.

“We’re supposed to lose half of all species by the turn of the next century and lot of times these pictures I do are the only national coverage these animals will ever get before they go extinct,” said Joel Sartore, a National Geographic photographer and founder of the National Geographic Photo Ark.

Sartore explained, “The goal of the project is to get the public to turn their eyes away from everyday distractions and to think about the other species we share the planet with—while there’s still time to save them. I want to get people to care, to fall in love, and to take action."

The Photo Ark is a multiyear effort and an incredible testament to saving animals’ records—if not the animals themselves.

"This is the best time ever to save species because so many need our help. We have to let people know that these animals exist, and that they're in trouble and what the need is,” Sartore.

Watch:

With the increases in price, demand of ivory in South-East Asian countries, Kenya Wildlife Service says poaching activities have increased to the highest ever recorded loss in a single year of 384 elephants and 19 rhinos in 2012, January 16, 2013.
Photo Credit: voa.gov

The following is an excerpt from the new book Extinction by Ashley Dawson (OR Books, 2016):

If capitalism is based on the illusory hope that a mysterious “invisible hand” will reconcile ruthlessly self-interested competition with the common good, modern capitalist society is correspondingly organized around antagonistic nation-states whose competing interests, it is vainly hoped, will be attuned through various international forums. Yet, wracked by the periodic crises of over-accumulation that are a structural feature of capitalism, the bourgeoisie is impelled to seek markets abroad. Since their peers in other nations are driven to cope with system-wide crises through similar expansionary policies, the result is increasing inter-imperial competition and endemic warfare. Capitalism thus generates a chaotic world system that compounds ecological crises.

In some cases, ecocide is a conscious strategy of imperialism, generating what might be termed ecological warfare. For example, the destruction of the great herds of bison that roamed the Great Plains of North America was a calculated military strategy designed to deprive Native Americans of the environmental resources on which they depended. When Europeans first arrived, the plains were inhabited by tens of millions of bison, providing indigenous peoples with resources that allowed them to maintain their autonomous, nomadic lifestyle. Commercial hunting of bison began in the 1830s, soon reaching a toll of two million animals a year.

By 1891, there were less than 1,000 bison left on the continent, and the Native Americans had been crushed— defeated militarily and forced onto a series of isolated, barren reservations. Many of these reservations were subsequently turned into “national sacrifice zones” during the Cold War, when nuclear weapons were exploded in sites such as Nevada in order to perfect the US’s military arsenal. Similar ecological violence was meted out by the US military to other parts of the planet. During the Vietnam War, for instance, nearly twenty million gallons of pesticides were sprayed on the tropical forests of Vietnam in an effort to destroy the ecological base of the revolutionary Vietnamese forces. This virulent campaign of ecological warfare eventually generated a revolt among US scientists, who balked at what they called the systematic ecocide being carried out by the military in Vietnam. Despite this history of war resistance, the US military, with more than 700 bases worldwide, remains the single most polluting organization on the planet.

In many cases, however, animals and plants simply suffer as collateral damage in the inter-imperial rivalries generated by capitalism. In a system of competing capitalist nations, no individual state has the power or responsibility to counteract the system’s tendencies toward ecological degradation. Indeed, inter-imperial competition impels individual states to shirk responsibility, seeking to score points by blaming their competitors for failing to address the environmental crisis. This fatal contradiction of capitalist society has been abundantly evident in the rounds of United Nations-sponsored climate negotiations during the last two decades. During these negotiations, advanced industrialized countries such as the United States and Great Britain have refused to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions significantly until developing nations such as China, India, and Brazil offer to cut their emissions as well. The industrializing nations respond by pointing out that their per capita emissions are still far lower than those of the wealthy nations of Europe and North America, and argue that these countries have benefited from two hundred years of industrial growth, effectively colonizing the atmosphere to exclusion of formerly colonized nations. As a result of these antagonistic positions, no binding international agreement on emissions reductions has been reached, despite years of desperate pleas from scientists and civil society. It is not simply that the climate and extinction crises have arrived at a uniquely unpropitious moment when neoliberal doctrines of financial deregulation, corporate power, and emaciated governance are hegemonic. Rather, the deadlocked climate negotiations are a reflection of the fundamentally irrational, chaotic, violence-ridden, and ecocidal world system produced by capitalism.

Can capitalist society reform itself sufficiently to cope with the extinction crisis? This is not simply unlikely. It is impossible in the long run. While it is true that the environmental movement did manage to push corporations and the state into cleaning up local crises from the late 1960s onwards, climate change and extinction suggest that the capitalist system is destroying its ecological foundations when viewed on a longer temporal scale. Recall that capital’s solution to periodic systemic crises is to initiate a new round of accumulation. Capital essentially tries to grow itself out of its problems. But, as we have seen, the extinction crisis is precisely a product of unchecked, blinkered growth. In such a context, conservation efforts can never be more than a paltry bandage over a gaping wound. As laudable as they are, conservation efforts largely fail to address the deep inequalities that capitalism generates, which push the poor to engage in deforestation and other forms of over-exploitation. Many of today’s major conservation organizations were established in the last half of the twentieth century: the Nature Conservancy (1951), World Wildlife Fund (1961), Natural Resources Defense Council (1970), and Conservation International (1987). Yet during this same period, a new round of accumulation based on neoliberal principles of unrestrained hyper-capitalism has engulfed the planet. The neoliberal era has seen much of the global South become increasingly indebted, leading international agencies such as the World Bank to force debtor nations to harvest more trees, mine more minerals, drill for more oil, and generally deplete their natural resources at exponentially greater rates. The result has been a steeply intensifying deterioration in global ecosystems, including a massive increase in the rate of extinction.

Despite this dramatic collapse of global ecosystems, the climate change crisis has unleashed a fresh round of accumulation, obscured by upbeat language about the investment opportunities opened up by the green economy. Neoliberal solutions to the climate crisis such as voluntary carbon offsets are not only failing to diminish carbon emissions, but are also dramatically augmenting the enclosure and destruction of the global environmental commons. Such programs allow polluting industries in wealthy nations to continue emitting carbon, while turning the forests and agricultural land of indigenous people and peasants in the global South into carbon dioxide “sinks” or biodiversity “banks.” Under the green economy, vast numbers of people, plants, and animals are being sacrificed as collateral damage in the ecocidal exploitation of the planet. Capitalism, it is clear, cannot solve the environmental crises it is causing.

Ashley Dawson is a professor of English at CUNY, New York City. He is the author of Mongrel Nation and The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature, as well as a short story in the anthology Staten Island Noir.

In January, NASA and NOAA Independently Confirmed 2015 Was Hottest Year on Record.

On Jan. 20, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that they had each independently determined that 2015 was the hottest year on record. In an online article, CNN.com reported: “While it wasn’t necessarily a surprise that 2015 finished in first place, its margin of victory was startling—it lapped the field, with the average temperature across the entire planet 1.62 F (0.90 C) above the 20th century average, more than 20 percent higher than the previous highest departure from average.” A NASA press release on the announcement noted that the increase in the earth’s temperature since the late 19th century has been “largely driven by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.” [CNN.com, 1/20/16; NASA, 1/20/16]

In March, NASA and NOAA Determined That February 2016 Was the Most Unusually Hot Month on Record.

On March 17, NOAA released data showing that “[t]he combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for February 2016” was not only “the highest for February in the 137-year period of record,” but also “surpassed the all-time monthly record” set in December 2015. As Time magazine reported, “NOAA’s findings confirm those released earlier this month by NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency that both show February as the most unusually hot month on record.” [NOAA, Global Analysis—February 2016, accessed 4/25/16; Time, 3/17/16]

After NASA and NOAA Announcements, CNN Aired Almost Five Times More Fossil Fuel Advertising Than Coverage of Climate Change and Global Temperature Milestones

Following Temperature Records, Big Oil Ads Outpaced Climate-Related Coverage on CNN By Nearly 5-To-1

This analysis examined CNN’s morning, daytime and primetime (4 a.m. to midnight ET) coverage for the one-week periods following the announcements that 2015 was the hottest year on record (Jan. 20-26) and that February 2016 was the most unusually hot month on record (March 17-23). During those timeframes, CNN aired 23.5 minutes of ads by Vote4Energy, a project of the American Petroleum Institute (API), compared to approximately five minutes of coverage about climate change or the temperature records, a ratio of nearly 5-to-1. The Hill reported in 2015 that the Vote4Energy ad campaign, which features individuals claiming that producing more oil and natural gas will benefit Americans and the economy, is part of API’s “attempt to convince voters to choose candidates who support the priorities of the oil and natural gas industry in 2016.”

In Week After Hottest Year Announcement, CNN Aired Less Than One Minute of Climate-Related Coverage and 13.5 Minutes of Oil Industry Ads.

From Jan. 20 to Jan. 26, CNN morning, daytime and primetime programming included only 57 seconds of coverage about climate change or the announcement that 2015 was the hottest year on record. Over that same time period, CNN aired 13.5 minutes of American Petroleum Institute ads. The climate-related segments included one on the January 21 edition of Early Start, in which anchor Christine Romans reported that 2015 was the hottest year on record and that officials say “the planet is still warming with no apparent change in the long term global warming rate.” Additionally, CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin briefly mentioned Republican climate science denial during a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Anderson Cooper 360 and CNN host Fareed Zakaria noted that the “[t]he World Economic Forum said this year that the greatest global risk is the failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation,” during a Fareed Zakaria GPS segment about a study finding that humans have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene.

Following Announcement That February 2016 Was Most Unusually Hot Month Ever, CNN Aired Four Minutes of Climate-Related Coverage and 10 Minutes Of Fossil Fuel Ads.

In the one-week period beginning March 17, when NOAA released data showing that February 2016 was the most unusually hot month ever recorded, CNN aired only four minutes of coverage about climate change or the temperature record during its morning, daytime and primetime coverage. During that same time period, CNN aired ten minutes of American Petroleum Institute ads. On March 18, CNN anchors Christine Romans and John Berman delivered nearly-identical reports on February’s “astounding” temperature record during the 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. editions of Early Start, respectively, but neither explicitly mentioned climate change or the role fossil fuel pollution and other human activities play in driving climate change. The March 20 edition of Fareed Zakaria GPS featured an interview with astronaut Piers Sellers about his climate change advocacy, followed by a brief report about International Energy Administration (IEA) data showing a decline in carbon emissions from energy production, which Zakaria described as “some good news on the climate front” and a “welcome update in the climate battle.” Finally, on the March 20 edition of New Day Sunday, anchor Christi Paul reported that major cities around the world were participating in Earth Hour, an event meant to bring awareness to climate change, by switching off their lights. [CNN, Early Start, 3/18/16, 3/18/16; Fareed Zakaria GPS, 3/20/16, 3/20/16; New Day Sunday, 3/20/16]

CNN Aired Two Additional Climate-Related Segments Between Midnight and 4 a.m. ET.

CNN aired two additional reports on climate change and the temperature records that were not included in this study because they occurred between midnight and 4 a.m. ET. Any fossil fuel ads that aired during these hours were also excluded. [CNN, CNN Newsroom, 1/21/16, 1/21/16]

MSNBC Aired Far Fewer Oil Industry Ads—and More Climate Change Coverage—Than CNN.

During the two one-week periods examined in this study, MSNBC aired six minutes of American Petroleum Institute ads (all during Morning Joe broadcasts), which was far less than the 23.5 minutes of API ads that aired on CNN. This study did not fully examine MSNBC’s climate change coverage, but one of MSNBC’s climate-related segments alone—during the Jan. 21 edition of Hardball—lasted six minutes and 21 seconds, exceeding both the amount of time MSNBC aired the API ads (six minutes) and the total amount of climate-related coverage on CNN over the two weeks of programming (approximately five minutes). The Hardball segment featured interviews by host Chris Matthews with Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Chris Mooney, an energy and environmental reporter for The Washington Post. [MSNBC, Hardball, 1/21/16]

CNN Also Aired Dozens of Koch Industries’ “We Are Koch” Ads.

In addition to airing the American Petroleum Institute ads, CNN aired dozens of Koch Industries ads during the two one-week periods analyzed in this study. The ads, which are part of Koch Industries’ “We are Koch” campaign, tout work that the oil billionaire Koch brothers’ company is doing in industries such as fertilizer production and clothing fibers. According to The Washington Post, the ads are an attempt by Koch Industries to “promote a warm, patriotic image of its multinational empire” and come at a time when “the company is adopting a more confrontational approach in the political arena, seeking to undermine its antagonists on the left.” According to InfluenceMap, a non-profit that uses objective metrics to track corporate positions on climate change, Koch Industries earned an “F” because it “appears to be actively opposing almost all areas of climate legislation.” [YouTube, 3/1/16, The Washington Post, 9/8/14; InfluenceMap, About our Scores, accessed 4/25/16; InfluenceMap, Koch Industries, accessed 4/25/16]

CNN Reports on Temperature Records Did Not Mention Fossil Fuel Pollution or Human Causes of Climate Change

Just One CNN Segment on Temperature Records Mentioned Climate Change—and None Mentioned Fossil Fuel Pollution or Other Ways Humans Impact Climate.

Of the three CNN segments about the hottest year or most unusually hot month on record that aired during the two one-week periods analyzed in this study, only one made any mention of “climate change” or “global warming”—and none addressed carbon pollution from the fossil fuel industry or any of the other ways in which humans are causing global warming. The one mention of global warming in a temperature record report came on the Jan. 21 edition of Early Start, when anchor Christine Romans reported that the latest figures from NASA and NOAA show that 2015 was the hottest year on record and added that officials say that “the planet is still warming with no apparent change in the long term global warming rate.” CNN’s two segments about February being the most unusually hot month, which aired during the 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. editions of Early Start on March 18, did not explicitly connect the temperature record to climate change or its human causes. [CNN, Early Start, 1/21/16, 3/18/16, 3/18/16]

Methodology

Media Matters searched CNN transcripts in Nexis for coverage between Jan. 20 and Jan. 26 and March 17 to March 23 using the terms “(climate or global warming) or (hottest or warmest or temperature! or heat or (National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA or NOAA or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) w/30 (year! or month! or “on record”).” We supplemented the Nexis search with similar queries on Factiva, IQ Media and CNN.com’s transcripts page for coverage of climate change, global warming, 2015 being the hottest year on record and February 2016 being the most unusually hot month ever recorded. Media Matters used TV Eyes and IQ Media to identify instances when American Petroleum Institute or Koch Industries ads ran and to obtain timestamps for API ads and climate-related segments.

This study includes all API ads and climate-related segments that aired on CNN—and all API ads that aired on MSNBC—between 4 a.m. and 12 a.m. ET on the above-mentioned dates. It does not include ads or segments that aired between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. ET or climate-related reporting that only aired on CNN International. One climate-related segment that aired on the Jan. 26 edition of CNN International’s Amanpour also aired on CNN, but did so on Jan. 27, which was outside of the one-week period assessed in this study.

MILAN MALPENSA - NOVEMBER 12, 2014: Ebola emergency simulation in Malpensa. A bogus infected patient has arrived in the airport, and then carried to "Sacco Hospital" by a special modified ambulance.
Photo Credit: Davide Calabresi / Shutterstock.com

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 140,000 people die annually as a direct result of the climate change that has occurred since the 1970s.

As the Earth’s temperature continues to rise, we will fast reach a tipping point where the climate will be the most dominant influence on human health and our health systems, far outstripping current drivers such as the aging population and lifestyle related diseases.

By 2050, climate change will contribute to doubling the number of people living in water-stressed basins; halving rain-fed agriculture in some African countries by 2020; increasing the number of people at risk of malaria (170 million by 2030) and dengue (2 billion by 2080); as well as increasing exposure to coastal flooding by a factor of 10, and extreme drought by a factor of 10-30, according to WHO.

In addition, a 40cm rise in sea level is expected to increase the average annual numbers of people affected by coastal storm surges from less than 50 million at present to nearly 250 million by 2080.

If this happens, the impact of heat stress conditions and upper respiratory tract ailments, as well as drought and hunger, will be profound. Our health systems are currently struggling to cope with the influx of chronic diseases that our lifestyles and aging are creating…what chance do they have when the true impact of ‘climate disease’ hits them?

Higher temps = more hospital visits

In the here and now, our densely populated cities, especially those which experience an urban heat island effect, already face extreme heat and degraded air quality. In New York City, each single degree (Celsius) increase in summertime surface temperature has been associated with a 2.7–3.1 percent increase in same-day hospitalizations due to respiratory diseases, and an increase of 1.4–3.6 percent in hospitalizations due to cardiovascular diseases.

In Hong Kong, there is a daily broadcast of what the pollutant index is and on some days, it’s recommended that parents don’t let their kids play outside. Coupled to this, food and waterborne infections show a direct correlation to rising temperatures.

Put simply, we’re headed for trouble and a changing climate will soon magnify the already significant effects of extreme weather on our public health system.

Salutogenics for Planet Earth

Our current hospitals and health systems are not designed to cater for climate disease. And while the predicted wave of climate disease is still a way off, hospitals are presently being designed with little regard to how they will adapt. Adaptability in healthcare design is probably the most forward thinking strategy our health departments and hospital designers can implement.

As yet, no one seems to have done the maths around the impact climate related health diseases place on our current burden of disease globally, and what this burden may become if the world were to become 2 degrees (Celsius) warmer. Arguably, there will be a need for different models of intervention and treatment, with new research and innovation to address climate disease.

When it comes to health, "salutogenics" has become fashionable; i.e., an increasing focus on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease. But, in focusing on designing the built environment to support human health, we’ve forgotten that if we do not start to design for wellness of the planet, there is little point in designing for wellness of the body.

Tied at the hip: health and climate

It’s time for health leaders to become climate leaders. If we want to see lasting and measurable change, health departments will have to heed the climate debate and then start synthesizing what this will mean to the design of the facilities they are delivering now.

We will have to start investigating how our health systems would cope with this changing disease cohort and start asking the question: "How will our facilities and health system adapt?"

The leaders of our health systems need to understand that there is an intrinsic inter-relationship between human health and sustainability that exceeds any cursory green agenda. We have to take being green seriously. For health practitioners, it must move beyond merely being environmentally responsible to actually protecting human health, which is in truth the very foundation of the Hippocratic Oath.

Designing sustainability

Deciding that sustainability measures are unaffordable and treating "environmental sustainability" as if it is an issue that is an adjunct to building design has to cease. Our design of health facilities today, and indeed all facilities, has to be capable of changing drastically.

If environmental sustainability is directly linked to human health, we may need to spawn the concept of ‘health credits’ instead of ‘carbon credits’ and start to value those credits differently, given the potential to reduce the cost of healthcare in future.

Back in 2000, the WHO predicted that ‘climate related health diseases’ could have a significant impact on our burden of disease, yet our health departments and health operators are blind to the biggest risk to our health systems: the environment.

There is an innate link between the environment we live in and human health. We cannot afford to wait another 15 years to start asking what role the designers, the private health industry and the general public can play in changing our course.

Susie Pearn has over 20 years of experience in the health sector with a background in health project management. She holds a bachelor's degree in planning and design, a master's degrees in business administration and is a certified practitioner in Managing Successful Programmes (MSP). Susie currently serves as a health expertise leader at Aurecon.

It’s not looking good for the global fossil fuel industry. Although the world remains heavily dependent on oil, coal and natural gas—which today supply around 80 percent of our primary energy needs—the industry is rapidly crumbling.

This is not merely a temporary blip, but a symptom of a deeper, long-term process related to global capitalism’s escalating overconsumption of planetary resources and raw materials.

New scientific research shows that the growing crisis of profitability facing fossil fuel industries is part of an inevitable period of transition to a post-carbon era.

But ongoing denialism has led powerful vested interests to continue clinging blindly to their faith in fossil fuels, with increasingly devastating and unpredictable consequences for the environment.

Bankruptcy epidemic

In February, the financial services firm Deloitte predicted that over 35 percent of independent oil companies worldwide are likely to declare bankruptcy, potentially followed by a further 30 percent next year—a total of 65 percent of oil firms around the world. Since early last year, already 50 North American oil and gas producers have filed bankruptcy.

The cause of the crisis is the dramatic drop in oil prices—down by two-thirds since 2014—which are so low that oil companies are finding it difficult to generate enough revenue to cover the high costs of production, while also repaying their loans.

Oil and gas companies most at risk are those with the largest debt burden. And that burden is huge—as much as $2.5 trillion, according to The Economist. The real figure is probably higher.

At a speech at the London School of Economics in February, Jaime Caruana of the Bank for International Settlements said that outstanding loans and bonds for the oil and gas industry had almost tripled between 2006 and 2014 to a total of $3 trillion.

This massive debt burden, he explained, has put the industry in a double-bind: In order to service the debt, they are continuing to produce more oil for sale, but that only contributes to lower market prices. Decreased oil revenues means less capacity to repay the debt, thus increasing the likelihood of default.

Stranded assets

This $3 trillion of debt is at risk because it was supposed to generate a 3-to-1 increase in value, but instead—thanks to the oil price decline—represents a value of less than half of this.

Worse, according to a Goldman Sachs study quietly published in December last year, as much as $1 trillion of investments in future oil projects around the world are unprofitable, effectively stranded.

Examining 400 of the world’s largest new oil and gas fields (except U.S. shale), the Goldman study found that $930 billion worth of projects (more than two-thirds) are unprofitable at Brent crude prices below $70. (Prices are now well below that.)

The collapse of these projects due to unprofitability would result in the loss of oil and gas production equivalent to a colossal 8 percent of current global demand. If that happens, suddenly or otherwise, it would wreck the global economy.

The Goldman analysis was based purely on the internal dynamics of the industry. A further issue is that internationally-recognized climate change risks mean that to avert dangerous global warming, much of the world’s remaining fossil fuel resources cannot be burned.

All of this is leading investors to question the wisdom of their investments, given fears that much of the assets that the oil, gas and coal industries use to estimate their own worth could consist of resources that will never ultimately be used.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative, which analyzes carbon investment risks, points out that over the next decade, fossil fuel companies risk wasting up to $2.2 trillion of investments in new projects that could turn out to be “uneconomic” in the face of international climate mitigation policies.

More and more fossil fuel industry shareholders are pressuring energy companies to stop investing in exploration for fear that new projects could become worthless due to climate risks.

“Clean technology and climate policy are already reducing fossil fuel demand,” said James Leaton, head of research at Carbon Tracker. “Misreading these trends will destroy shareholder value. Companies need to apply 2C stress tests to their business models now.”

In a prescient report published last November, Carbon Tracker identified the energy majors with the greatest exposures—and thus facing the greatest risks—from stranded assets: Royal Dutch Shell, Pemex, Exxon Mobil, Peabody Energy, Coal India and Glencore.

At the time, the industry scoffed at such a bold pronouncement. Six months after this report was released—a week ago—Peabody went bankrupt. Who’s next?

The Carbon Tracker analysis may underestimate the extent of potential losses. A new paper just out in the journal Applied Energy, from a team at Oxford University’s Institute for New Economic Thinking, shows that the “stranded assets” concept applies not just to unburnable fossil fuel reserves, but also to a vast global carbon-intensive electricity infrastructure, which could be rendered as defunct as the fossil fuels it burns and supplies to market.

The coming debt spiral

Some analysts believe the hidden trillion-dollar black hole at the heart of the oil industry is set to trigger another global financial crisis, similar in scale to the Dot-Com crash.

Jason Schenker, president and chief economist at Prestige Economics, says: “Oil prices simply aren’t going to rise fast enough to keep oil and energy companies from defaulting. Then there is a real contagion risk to financial companies and from there to the rest of the economy.”

Schenker has been ranked by Bloomberg News as one of the most accurate financial forecasters in the world since 2010. The US economy, he forecasts, will dip into recession at the end of 2016 or early 2017.

Mark Harrington, an oil industry consultant, goes further. He believes the resulting economic crisis from cascading debt defaults in the industry could make the 2007-8 financial crash look like a cakewalk. “Oil and gas companies borrowed heavily when oil prices were soaring above $70 a barrel,” he wrote on CNBC in January.

“But in the past 24 months, they’ve seen their values and cash flows erode ferociously as oil prices plunge—and that’s made it hard for some to pay back that debt. This could lead to a massive credit crunch like the one we saw in 2008. With our economy just getting back on its feet from the global 2008 financial crisis, timing could not be worse.”

Ratings agency Standard & Poor (S&P) reported this week that 46 companies have defaulted on their debt this year—the highest levels since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009. The total quantity in defaults so far is $50 billion.

Half this year’s defaults are from the oil and gas industry, according to S&P, followed by the metals, mining and the steel sector. Among them was coal giant Peabody Energy.

Despite public reassurances, bank exposure to these energy risks from unfunded loan facilities remains high. Officially, only 2.5 percent of bank assets are exposed to energy risks.

But it’s probably worse. Confidential Wall Street sources claim that the Federal Reserve in Dallas has secretly advised major U.S. banks in closed-door meetings to cover up potential energy-related losses. The Federal Reserve denies the allegations, but refuses to respond to Freedom of Information requests on internal meetings, on the obviously false pretext that it keeps no records of any of its meetings.

According to Bronka Rzepkoswki of the financial advisory firm Oxford Economics, over a third of the entire U.S. high yield bond index is vulnerable to low oil prices, increasing the risk of a tidal wave of corporate bankruptcies: “Conditions that usually pave the way for mounting defaults—such as growing bad debt, tightening monetary conditions, tightening of corporate credit standards and volatility spikes – are currently met in the U.S.”

The end of cheap oil

Behind the crisis of oil’s profitability that threatens the entire global economy is a geophysical crisis in the availability of cheap oil. Cheap here does not refer simply to the market price of oil, but the total cost of production. More specifically, it refers to the value of energy.

There is a precise scientific measure for this, virtually unknown in conventional economic and financial circles, known as Energy Return on Investment—which essentially quantifies the amount of energy extracted, compared to the inputs of energy needed to conduct the extraction. The concept of EROI was first proposed and developed by Professor Charles A. Hall of the Department of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York. He found that an approximate EROI value for any energy source could be calculated by dividing the quantity of energy produced by the amount of energy inputted into the production process.

Therefore, the higher the EROI, the more energy that a particular source and technology is capable of producing. The lower the EROI, the less energy this source and technology is actually producing.

A new peer-reviewed study led by the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico has undertaken a comparative review of the EROI of all the major sources of energy that currently underpin industrial civilization—namely oil, gas, coal, and uranium.

Published in the journal Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, the scientists note that the EROI for fossil fuels has inexorably declined over a relatively short period of time: “Nowadays, the world average value EROI for hydrocarbons in the world has gone from a value of 35 to a value of 15 between 1960 and 1980.”

In other words, in just two decades, the total value of the energy being produced via fossil fuel extraction has plummeted by more than half. And it continues to decline.

This is because the more fossil fuel resources that we exploit, the more we have used up those resources that are easiest and cheapest to extract. This compels the industry to rely increasingly on resources that are more difficult and expensive to get out of the ground, and bring to market.

The EROI for conventional oil, according to the Mexican scientists, is 18. They estimate, optimistically, that: “World reserves could last for 35 or 45 years at current consumption rates.” For gas, the EROI is 10, and world reserves will last around “45 or 55 years.” Nuclear’s EROI is 6.5, and according to the study authors, “The peak in world production of uranium will be reached by 2045.”

The problem is that although we are not running out of oil, we are running out of the cheapest, easiest to extract form of oil and gas. Increasingly, the industry is making up for the shortfall by turning to unconventional forms of oil and gas—but these have very little energy value from an EROI perspective.

The Mexico team examine the EROI values of these unconventional sources, tar sands, shale oil, and shale gas: “The average value for EROI of tar sands is four. Only ten percent of that amount is economically profitable with current technology.”

For shale oil and gas, the situation is even more dire: “The EROI varies between 1.5 and 4, with an average value of 2.8. Shale oil is very similar to the tar sands; being both oil sources of very low quality. The shale gas revolution did not start because its exploitation was a very good idea; but because the most attractive economic opportunities were previously exploited and exhausted.”

In effect, the growing reliance on unconventional oil and gas has meant that, overall, the costs and inputs into energy production to keep industrial civilization moving are rising inexorably.

It’s not that governments don’t know. It’s that decisions have already been made to protect the vested interests that have effectively captured government policymaking through lobbying, networking and donations.

Three years ago, the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID) commissioned and published an in-depth report, “EROI of Global Energy Resources: Status, Trends and Social Implications.” The report went completely unnoticed by the media.

Its findings are instructive: “We find the EROI for each major fossil fuel resource (except coal) has declined substantially over the last century. Most renewable and non-conventional energy alternatives have substantially lower EROI values than conventional fossil fuels.”

The decline in EROI has meant that an increasing amount of the energy we extract is having to be diverted back into getting new energy out, leaving less for other social investments.

This means that the global economic slowdown is directly related to the declining resource quality of fossil fuels. The DFID report warns: “The declining EROI of traditional fossil fuel energy sources and its eventual effect on the world economy are likely to result in a myriad of unforeseen consequences.”

Shortly after this report was released, I met with a senior civil servant at DFID familiar with its findings, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. I asked him whether this important research had actually impacted policymaking in the department.

“Unfortunately, no,” he told me, shrugging. “Most of my colleagues, except perhaps a handful, simply don’t have a clue about these issues. And of course, despite the report being circulated widely within the department, and shared with other relevant government departments, there is little interest from ministers who appear to be ideologically pre-committed to fracking.”

Peak oil

The driving force behind the accelerating decline in resource quality, hotly denied in the industry, is ‘peak oil.’

An extensive scientific analysis published in February in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy & Environment lays bare the extent of industry denialism. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIRES) is a series of high-quality peer-reviewed publications which runs authoritative reviews of the literature across relevant academic disciplines.

The new WIRES paper is authored by Professor Michael Jefferson of the ESCP Europe Business School, a former chief economist at oil major Royal Dutch/Shell Group, where he spent nearly 20 years in various senior roles from Head of Planning in Europe to Director of Oil Supply and Trading. He later became Deputy Secretary-General of the World Energy Council, and is editor of the leading Elsevier science journal Energy Policy.

In his new study, Jefferson examines a recent 1865-page “global energy assessment” (GES) published by the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis. But he criticized the GES for essentially ducking the issue of ‘peak oil.”

“This was rather odd,” he wrote. “First, because the evidence suggests that the global production of conventional oil plateaued and may have begun to decline from 2005.”

He went on to explain that standard industry assessments of the size of global conventional oil reserves have been dramatically inflated, noting how “the five major Middle East oil exporters altered the basis of their definition of ‘proved’ conventional oil reserves from a 90 percent probability down to a 50 percent probability from 1984. The result has been an apparent (but not real) increase in their ‘proved’ conventional oil reserves of some 435 billion barrels.”

Added to those estimates are reserve figures from Venezuelan heavy oil and Canadian tar sands, bringing up global reserve estimates by a further 440 billion barrels, despite the fact that they are “more difficult and costly to extract” and generally of “poorer quality” than conventional oil.

“Put bluntly, the standard claim that the world has proved conventional oil reserves of nearly 1.7 trillion barrels is overstated by about 875 billion barrels. Thus, despite the fall in crude oil prices from a new peak in June 2014, after that of July 2008, the ‘peak oil’ issue remains with us.”

Jefferson believes that a nominal economic recovery, combined with cutbacks in production as the industry reacts to its internal crises, will eventually put the current oil supply glut in reverse. This will pave the way for “further major oil price rises” in years to come.

It’s not entirely clear if this will happen. If the oil crisis hits the economy hard, then the prolonged recession that results could dampen the rising demand that everyone projects. If oil prices thus remain relatively depressed for longer than expected, this could hemorrhage the industry beyond repair.

Eventually, the loss of production may allow prices to rise again. OPEC estimates that investments in oil exploration and development are at their lowest level in six years. As bankruptcies escalate, the accompanying drop in investments will eventually lead world oil production to fall, even as global demand begins to rise.

This could lead oil prices to climb much higher, as rocketing demand—projected to grow 50 percent by 2035—hits the scarcity of production. Such a price spike, ironically, would also be incredibly bad for the global economy, and as happened with the 2007-8 financial crash, could feed into inflation and trigger another spate of consumer debt-defaults in the housing markets.

Even if that happens, the assumption—the hope—is that oil industry majors will somehow survive the preceding cascade of debt-defaults. The other assumption is that demand for oil will rise.

But as new sources of renewable energy come online at a faster and faster pace, as innovation in clean technologies accelerates, old fossil fuel-centric projections of future rising demand for oil may need to be jettisoned.

Clean energy

According to another new study released in March in Energy Policy by two scientists at Texas A&M University, “Non-renewable energy”—that is “fossil fuels and nuclear power”—“are projected to peak around mid-century ... Subsequent declining non-renewable production will require a rapid expansion in the renewable energy sources (RES) if either population and/or economic growth is to continue.”

The demise of the fossil fuel empire, the study forecasts, is inevitable. Whichever model run the scientists used, the end output was the same: the almost total displacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy sources by the end of the century; and, as a result, the transformation and localisation of economic activity.

But the paper adds that to avoid a rise in global average temperatures of 2C, which would tip climate change into the danger zone, 50 percent or more of existing fossil fuel reserves must remain unused.

The imperative to transition away from fossil fuels is, therefore, both geophysical and environmental. On the one hand, by mid-century, fossil fuels and nuclear power will become obsolete as a viable source of energy due to their increasingly high costs and low quality. On the other, even before then, to maintain what scientists describe as a ‘safe operating space’ for human survival, we cannot permit the planet to warm a further 2C without risking disastrous climate impacts.

Staying below 2C, the study finds, will require renewable energy to supply more than 50 percent of total global energy by 2028, “a 37-fold increase in the annual rate of supplying renewable energy in only 13 years.”

While this appears to be a herculean task by any standard, the Texas A&M scientists conclude that by century’s end, the demise of fossil fuels is going to happen anyway, with or without considerations over climate risks:

… the ‘ambitious’ end-of-century decarbonisation goals set by the G7 leaders will be achieved due to economic and geologic fossil fuel limitations within even the unconstrained scenario in which little-to-no pro-active commitment to decarbonise is required… Our model results indicate that, with or without climate considerations, RES [renewable energy sources] will comprise 87–94 percent of total energy demand by the end of the century.

But as renewables have a much lower EROI than fossil fuels, this will “quickly reduce the share of net energy available for societal use.” With less energy available to societies, “it is speculated that there will have to be a reprioritization of societal energetic needs”—in other words, a very different kind of economy in which unlimited material growth underpinned by endless inputs of cheap fossil fuel energy are a relic of the early 21st century.

The 37-fold annual rate of increase in the renewable energy supply seems unachievable at first glance, but new data just released from the Abu Dhabi-based International Renewable Energy Agency shows that clean power is well on its way, despite lacking the massive subsidies behind fossil fuels.

The data reveals that last year, solar power capacity rose by 37 percent. Wind power grew by 17 percent, geothermal by 5 percent and hydropower by 3 percent.

So far, the growth rate for solar power has been exponential. A Deloitte Center for Energy Solutions report from September 2015 noted that the speed and spread of solar energy had consistently outpaced conventional linear projections, and continues to do so.

While the costs of solar power is consistently declining, solar power generation has doubled every year for the last 20 years. With every doubling of solar infrastructure, the production costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) has dropped by 22 percent.

At this rate, according to analysts like Tony Seba—a lecturer in business entrepreneurship, disruption and clean energy at Stanford University—the growth of solar is already on track to go global. With eight more doublings, that’s by 2030, solar power would be capable of supplying 100 percent of the world’s energy needs. And that’s even without the right mix of government policies in place to support renewables.

According to Deloitte, while Seba’s forecast is endorsed by a minority of experts, it remains a real possibility that should be taken seriously. But the firm points out that obstacles remain:

“It would not make economic sense for utility planners to shutter thousands of megawatts of existing generating capacity before the end of its economic life and replace it with new solar generation.”

Yet Deloitte’s study did not account for the escalating crisis in profitability already engulfing the fossil fuel industries, and the looming pressure of stranded assets due to climate risks. As the uneconomic nature of fossil fuels becomes ever more obvious, so too will the economic appeal of clean energy.

Race against time

The question is whether the transition to a post-carbon energy system—the acceptance of the inevitable death of the oil economy—will occur fast enough to avoid climate catastrophe.

Given that the 2C target for a safe climate is widely recognized to be inadequate—scientists increasingly argue that even a 1C rise in global average temperatures would be sufficient to trigger dangerous, irreversible changes to the earth’s climate.

According to a 2011 report by the National Academy of Sciences, the scientific consensus shows conservatively that for every degree of warming, we will see the following impacts: 5-15 percent reductions in crop yields; 3-10 percent increases in rainfall in some regions contributing to flooding; 5-10 percent decreases in stream-flow in some river basins, including the Arkansas and the Rio Grande, contributing to scarcity of potable water; 200-400 percent increases in the area burned by wildfire in the US; 15 percent decreases in annual average Arctic sea ice, with 25 percent decreases in the yearly minimum extent in September.

Even if all CO2 emissions stopped, the climate would continue to warm for several more centuries. Over thousands of years, the National Academy warns, this could unleash amplifying feedbacks leading to the disappearance of the polar ice sheets and other dramatic changes. In the meantime, the risk of catastrophic wild cards “such as the potential large-scale release of methane from deep-sea sediments” or permafrost, is impossible to quantify.

In this context, even if the solar-driven clean energy revolution had every success, we still need to remove carbon that has already accumulated in the atmosphere, to return the climate to safety.

The idea of removing carbon from the atmosphere sounds technologically difficult and insanely expensive. It’s not. In reality, it is relatively simple and cheap.

A new book by Eric Toensmeier, a lecturer at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, The Carbon Farming Solution, sets out in stunningly accessible fashion how ‘regenerative farming’ provides the ultimate carbon-sequestration solution.

Regenerative farming is a form of small-scale, localised, community-centred organic agriculture which uses techniques that remove carbon from the atmosphere, and sequester it in plant material or soil.

Using an array of land management and conservation practices, many of which have been tried and tested by indigenous communities, it’s theoretically possible to scale up regenerative farming methods in a way that dramatically offsets global carbon emissions.

Toensmeier’s valuable book discusses these techniques, and unlike other science-minded tomes, offers a practical toolkit for communities to begin exploring how they can adopt regenerative farming practices for themselves.

According to the Rodale Institute, the application of regenerative farming on a global scale could have revolutionary results:

Simply put, recent data from farming systems and pasture trials around the globe show that we could sequester more than 100 percent of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available and inexpensive organic management practices, which we term ‘regenerative organic agriculture’… These practices work to maximize carbon fixation while minimizing the loss of that carbon once returned to the soil, reversing the greenhouse effect.

This has been widely corroborated. For instance, a 2015 study part-funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that “replacing chemical fertilizer with organic manure significantly decreased the emission of GHGs [greenhouse gases]. Yields of wheat and corn also increased as the soil fertility was improved by the application of cattle manure. Totally replacing chemical fertilizer with organic manure decreased GHG emissions, which reversed the agriculture ecosystem from a carbon source… to a carbon sink.”

Governments are catching on, if slowly. At the Paris climate talks, 25 countries and over 50 NGOs signed up to the French government’s ‘4 per 1000’ initiative, a global agreement to promote regenerative farming as a solution for food security and climate disaster.

The birth of post-capitalism

There can be no doubt, then, that by the end of this century, life as we know it on planet earth will be very different. Fossil fueled predatory capitalism will be dead. In its place, human civilization will have little choice but to rely on a diversity of clean, renewable energy sources.

Whatever choices we make this century, the coming generations in the post-carbon future will have to deal with the realities of an overall warmer, and therefore more unpredictable, climate. Even if regenerative processes are in place to draw down carbon from the atmosphere, this takes time—and in the process, some of the damage climate change will wreak on our oceans, our forests, our waterways, our coasts, and our soils will be irreversible.

It could take centuries, if not millennia, for the planet to reach a new, stable equilibrium.

But either way, the work of repairing and mitigating at least some of the damage done will be the task of our childrens’ children, and their children, and on.

Economic activity in this global society will of necessity be very different to the endless growth juggernaut we have experienced since the industrial revolution. In this post-carbon future, material production and consumption, and technological innovation, will only be sustainable through a participatory ‘circular economy’ in which scarce minerals and raw materials are carefully managed.

The fast-paced consumerism that we take for granted today simply won’t work in these circumstances.

Large top-down national and transnational structures will begin to become obsolete due to the large costs of maintenance, the unsustainability of the energy inputs needed for their survival, and the shift in power to new decentralized producers of energy and food.

In the place of such top-down structures, smaller-scale, networked forms of political, social and economic organization, connected through revolutionary information technologies, will be most likely to succeed. For communities to not just survive, but thrive, they will need to work together, sharing technology, expertise and knowledge on the basis of a new culture of human parity and cooperation.

Of course, before we get to this point, there will be upheaval. Today’s fossil fuel incumbency remains in denial, and is unlikely to accept the reality of its inevitable demise until it really does drop dead.

The escalation of resource wars, domestic unrest, xenophobia, state-militarism, and corporate totalitarianism is to be expected. These are the death throes of a system that has run its course.

The outcomes of the struggles which emerge in coming decades—struggles between people and power, but also futile geopolitical struggles within the old centers of power (paralleled by misguided struggles between peoples)—is yet to be written.

Eager to cling to the last vestiges of existence, the old centers of power will still try to self-maximize within the framework of the old paradigm, at the expense of competing power-centers, and even their own populations.

And they will deflect from the root causes of the problem as much as possible, by encouraging their constituents to blame other power-centers, or worse, some of their fellow citizens, along the lines of all manner of ‘Otherizing’ constructs, race, ethnicity, nationality, color, religion and even class.

Have no doubt. In coming decades, we will watch the old paradigm cannibalize itself to death on our TV screens, tablets and cell phones. Many of us will do more than watch. We will be participant observers, victims or perpetrators, or both at once.

The only question that counts is, amidst this unfolding maelstrom, are we going to join with others to plant the seeds of viable post-carbon societies for the next generations of human beings, or are we going to stand in the way of that viable future by giving ourselves entirely to defending our interests in the framework of the old paradigm?

Whatever happens over coming decades, the choices each of us make will ultimately determine the nature of what survives by the end of this pivotal transitional century.

Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist and international security scholar. He writes the System Shift column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his former work at the Guardian. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel Zero Point, among other books. 

A friend of mine is a farmer out in Montana. She’s also eight months pregnant with her first child.

Recently she looked out her window and saw a worker spraying pesticides on her neighbor’s farm. Concerned for the health of her baby, she called the neighbor about the spraying. “Oh,” the neighbor asked, “do you want him to spray your land too?”

She remained polite on the phone but was internally panicked. What had he sprayed, and how would it affect her child?

In the day that followed, she faced dilemmas like whether to take the dog in the car and walk him somewhere else, or even not to walk him at all.

Was the land around her poisoned? Could she walk anywhere without endangering her child? She became a virtual prisoner in her home.

She’s not the only one I know who lives in the country and faces issues like this.

Another friend deals with her neighbor’s cow manure, which runs off into her stream. The neighbor in this case is a nice guy, she says, but there’s a cultural divide between her and the farmers who surround her. She doesn’t see a way to approach them about issues like these to achieve any kind of good results.

Thanks to this divide, what could be a matter of common courtesy—neighbors having a reasonable conversation to keep from imposing on one another—feels impossible.

The question of “organic vs. pesticides” or “local food vs. industrial food” (or however else you want to frame it) hasn’t been a rational debate for a long time. It’s ideological. To the farmers in the two anecdotes above, it’s likely an identity issue.

That is, in farming communities, one’s stance on pesticides or so-called factory farms becomes a part of one’s identity. Anyone who disagrees with you isn’t just engaging in a reasonable disagreement—they’re attacking your very identity.

How do we shift the discourse? How can neighbors learn to have reasonable—and honest—discussions about hot-button food issues?

It can be done. I’ve done it.

I’ve also not done it.

That is, with some people, I’ve been able to have a frank conversation in which each of us is honest. We spoke as human beings, despite some fundamental disagreements.

But in other cases, we couldn’t get past talking points and slogans. Some people, for example, claimed that anyone who takes issue with pesticides or any other agricultural practice is “anti-farmer.” When that’s the case, talking to one another is a pure waste of time.

Right now, we stand at a point in history when most Americans are separated from the production of their food, but also when more and more of us are concerned about where it comes from.

Sometimes that enthusiasm gets ahead of our knowledge of farming, but that’s not a reason to dismiss anyone. It’s a reason for dialogue. Each side has something to learn and something to contribute.

We can go in two directions. Either each side can become more polarized and more entrenched in their positions, or each side can open up to discussion. Let’s take the high road.

This land-saving makes sense when considering the conversion rate between the grain that we could have directly consumed but instead feed to livestock. For example, in the US, it takes an astounding 25kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, pigs require a grain to meat ratio of 9:1 and chickens, relatively less wasteful, are 3:1. As renowned ecologist Hugh Possingham put it: “Just stop feeding grain to animals – don’t eat something that ate something that you could have eaten.”

Plant-based diets are particularly impressive when compared to those that are rich in meat, which would require a 50% increase in global cropland area by 2050. In order to achieve this with a chance of no-deforestation, we’d have to convert lots of pasture to cropland and substantially increase yields, likely through using chemicals. But both conversion and intensification generally degrade ecosystems and lead to less biodiversity.

Overall the new study found that a meat-eater requires at least double the resources of a vegan or vegetarian.

Frozen carcasses suspected to be sharks found in Dong Gang, Taiwan. Fins are not allowed to be separated from shark carcasses under legislation Taiwan passed in 2012, but in a single three-month investigation in just one port in Taiwan, Greenpeace East Asia uncovered 16 illegal cases of shark finning.

2. Human rights abuses

With up to 160,000 migrant workers working on Taiwan’s distant water fishing vessels, the industry appears beset by issues of human trafficking, and forced and debt-bonded labour.

Recent high profile cases implicate Taiwanese vessels and companies in shootings at sea, human trafficking, and illegal fishing, and a complete picture emerges, that of an industry urgently needing reining in.

Fishermen haul in their lines on tuna longliner in the South Pacific albacore tuna fishery.

3. Exploitation

Interviews with dozens of foreign workers on Taiwanese fishing boats reveal a culture of exploitation, bullying and violence.

The report exposes Taiwan’s distant water fisheries’ abusive treatment of foreign crew. Interviews with South East Asian crew members reveal delayed and withheld payments, along with horrendous working conditions, exploitation by recruiting agents, verbal and serious physical abuse, and death at sea.

Frozen carcasses of fish suspected to be sharks in Dong Gang, Taiwan.

So What Can Be Done?

We all knew there was a problem: six months ago, EU issued Taiwan a yellow card, warning of trade sanctions, but we didn’t have the full picture.

To date, Taiwan government appears to be moving towards the right direction by proposing new laws and adopting necessary revisions to the old ones. The problem is, you can make anything you don’t like illegal, but unless you police it and enforce it, it’s pointless. It’s time to spread the news far and wide that Taiwan’s fisheries industry is tainted by environmental and human rights abuses.

We can demand our supermarkets, sushi bars and stores buy from brands that can tell us where our tuna comes from, and guarantee we’re not supporting human rights abuse, shark finning, and illegal fishing if we’re buying seafood. Check out our tuna guides here.

A lot of this tuna ends up in the supply chain of companies like Thai Union, from where it is marketed across the world.

April marked the sixth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy that occurred in the Gulf. We can’t let a similar tragedy happen in the Arctic.

Yet, the Obama administration recently released its proposed 5-year plan for offshore leasing, and while the Atlantic has been given a pass from drilling, the Arctic is still open to potential future development. If we want to address climate change in a meaningful way we need to acknowledge that exposing new areas, especially sensitive areas like the Arctic, to potential fossil fuel development simply can’t happen.

In 2007, our 57’ sailboat, Cloud Nine, was transiting the Northwest Passage among the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. What used to be icy and treacherous waters, instead were nearly ice free. In fact, to the astonishment of those on board, the nearly 7000-mile voyage took only 73 days, and the Cloud Nine never touched one piece of ice.

This was a very different picture from what happened when we attempted the same route in the summer of 1994. That summer we were met by ice choking off all potential routes. We were forced to abandon the voyage and retreat out of the Arctic.

In the 13 short years between those two sailing expeditions to the far north, there was a 40 percent loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. That is a 40 percent loss of our northern polar ice cap. Human activity is having a profound and sudden impact on Earth’s climate systems, and the Arctic is experiencing the most rapid and visible changes. And in March, in a move counter to preventing the human impacts of climate change, President Obama and his administration left open the possibility for potential Arctic offshore drilling. This is unacceptable. We need to do better to protect our planet.

The Arctic Ocean environment is harsh and unforgiving – it is cold, dark and icy for most of the year. There is little infrastructure in place to help if there was a spill – the nearest Coast Guard station is 1,000 miles away. And the fact is: when we drill, we spill. Accidents are part of drilling and the risks in the Arctic are huge. According to the federal government’s own report, there is about a 75 percent chance of a spill if development happens in the Chukchi Sea. And we know that cleaning up a spill in the Arctic’s icy environment is impossible.

For centuries, explorers have sought to navigate the Northwest Passage — a shortcut from Europe to Asia that would negate sailing around the southern extremes of Africa or South America. For much of that time, the idea was something between a flight of fancy and a dangerously unapproachable challenge. Now, the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route are opening to navigation, and we understand that our very own human activity is causing the Arctic environment to rapidly change.

President Obama has made a commitment to mitigate climate change and has announced a U.S.-Canadian agreement to work together to protect the Arctic. The Arctic, which is dual-threatened by climate change and fossil fuel development, should be taken off the table to leasing in the 5-year plan. The president still has time to make the right decision and remove new Arctic leases from the plan – protecting our climate and protecting the Arctic are intrinsically linked, and we can no longer stand by and pretend that we don’t see the impacts of humans on climate change and the Arctic.

In America’s never-ending pursuit to be number one in all things, it has achieved top billing in a number of troubling areas, including where overmedication is concerned. We are the most pill-popping country on earth, with an astounding 70 percent of us regularly taking one prescription drug and about half of us taking two. A quarter of us take five or more prescription medications, according to the Mayo Clinic—which for the record, is a lot.

What goes into our bodies ultimately must come out, and that’s as true for meds as it is for anything else. Without getting into the elephant in the room (the question of what it means when a good portion of the population is taking enough drugs to kill said elephant?), let’s turn to another issue. That is, when some of those pharmaceuticals are excreted—meaning peed out by users—they generally end up in our toilet water. From there, they enter our waterways and recycled water supplies, the latter of which are used to irrigate food crops. Ultimately, new research finds, those drugs can unwittingly be re-absorbed both by humans and fish who never signed up for a prescription.

A new survey released in March by the University of Jerusalem confirms that crops can bear the fruit, so to speak, of our prescription drug use. Researchers looked specifically at the cycle of carbamazepine, a pharmaceutical anticonvulsant generally used in the treatment of epilepsy that is also “ubiquitously detected in reclaimed wastewater, highly persistent in soil, and taken up by crops.” According to Science Daily, researchers had subjects eat produce—“tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and lettuce”—irrigated with treated wastewater for seven consecutive days. At the end of the week “all members of the first group exhibited quantifiable levels of carbamazepine” in their urine.

"Treated wastewater-irrigated produce exhibited substantially higher carbamazepine levels than fresh water-irrigated produce," study lead Ora Paltiel, director of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine, told Science Daily. “It is evident that those who consume produce grown in soil irrigated with treated wastewater increase their exposure to the drug. Though the levels detected were much lower than in patients who consume the drug, it is important to assess the exposure in commercially available produce. This study demonstrates 'proof of concept' that human exposure to pharmaceuticals occurs through ingestion of commercially available produce irrigated with treated wastewater, providing data which could guide policy and risk assessments.”

Before you start losing sleep about the drugs you’re taking in through the items in your crisper drawer, note that the study group later spent a week eating fresh-water treated crops. Researchers examined the urine again and found that the carbamazepine levels had returned to baseline levels. But Ars Technica points out why these results still deserve further inquiry:

While the amounts of the drug in produce-eater’s pee were [10,000 times lower] than what is seen in the pee of patients purposefully taking the drugs, researchers speculate that the trace amounts could still have health effects in some people, such as those with a genetic sensitivity to the drugs, pregnant women, children, and those who eat a lot of produce, such as vegetarians. And with the growing practice of reclaiming wastewater for crop irrigation—particularly in places that face water shortages such as California, Israel, and Spain—the produce contamination could become more common and more potent, the authors argue.

For fish, the widespread use of mental health drugs is turning out to have not so great collateral consequences. A report from Medco Health Solutions indicated that in 2010, more than 20 percent of American adults were taking “antidepressants, antipsychotics, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drugs [or] anti‐anxiety” medications, up by 22 percent over a decade prior. Another 2014 study found one out of 13 American schoolchildren takes at least one medicine for “emotional or behavioral difficulties.” Brian Bienkowski, writing at Environmental Health News, notes that about 250 million antidepressant prescriptions are filled each year in the U.S., making antidepressants the country’s most prescribed medications.

While those mood lifters might be helping some Americans cope with their days, they seem mostly to bum fish out. Bienkowski cites a study out of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that looked at the effect of putting low doses (one part per billion) of fluoxetine, more popularly known as Prozac, into water containing male fathead minnows. The result: not good.

Male minnows exposed to a small dose of the drug in laboratories ignored females. They spent more time under a tile, so their reproduction decreased and they took more time capturing prey... When the dose was increased, but still at levels found in some wastewater, females produced fewer eggs and males became aggressive, killing females in some cases.

The drugs seem to cause these behavioral problems by scrambling how genes in the fish brains are expressed, or turned on and off. The minnows were exposed when they were a couple of months old and still developing. There appeared to be architectural changes to the young minnows’ brains.

The new findings build on [study head and UWM professor Rebecca] Klaper’s previous research, which tested minnows with the gene changes to see how well they avoided predators. They swam longer distances and made more directional changes, which suggests that the drugs induced anxiety.

As Bienkowski notes, the World Health Organization says the amount of pharmaceuticals in our drinking water exists at levels that are about 1,000 times too low to have any real impact. But for marine animals, taking in antidepressants and other pharmaceuticals is a whole other matter.

“Fish do not metabolize drugs like we do,” Klaper told Bienkowski. “Even if environmental doses aren’t thought to be much for a human, fish could still have significant accumulation, and, it appears, changes in their brain’s gene expression.”

Around the globe, people’s access to water is being threatened every day by one of the most powerful institutions on the globe—the World Bank. Under the guise of development, the World Bank and its investment arm, the International Finance Corporation, invest hundreds of millions in water privatization schemes that reduce access to water, increase costs and have a devastating impact on people. What’s worse is that the IFC often positions itself to profit from these projects, creating an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

But one congresswoman just took a stand against this threat that could mean the beginning of the end of the World Bank’s harmful water-for-profit pursuits. In a letter, Representative Gwen Moore (D-WI) demanded the World Bank cease all promotion and financing of these projects pending an external review and congressional hearings on conflicts of interest. Because Moore is the ranking member of a subcommittee with direct World Bank oversight, it has no choice but to listen.

The letter, addressed to World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, describes the failure of a World Bank-backed water privatization project in Manila, Philippines—the “success story” the IFC uses in marketing around the world—as the foundation of her concern. In Manila, the IFC advised the government to contract with two private corporations to manage the city’s water system, which it did in 1997 in a concession deal that favored one corporation, Manila Water Company, with less debt and better infrastructure. The IFC subsequently took part ownership in MWC only.

As part owner of MWC, the IFC is now in direct opposition to the government’s efforts to keep water affordable for its people. And while the IFC has stood by MWC, it has made $43 million from its initial investment.

Regrettably, these shady dealings aren’t unique to Manila. Recently, as adviser to the government in Kigali, Rwanda, the IFC awarded a 27-year public-private partnership contract to a subsidiary of Metito—in which IFC also has an ownership stake. As if that weren’t enough, it also approved a $14 million loan to the corporation as part of the deal.

These deals create a perverse incentive for the World Bank to try to squeeze money out of the very people it’s supposed to be helping.

Thanks to organizing and powerful leaders like Moore, the World Bank’s course could be changing. In the face of campaigning and public scrutiny, the IFC divested its ownership stake in global water privatizer Veolia in 2014. And in Lagos, Nigeria, a popular movement against a proposed privatization project has brought the World Bank to its knees, forcing it to drop its goal of securing a private sector contract for the water system in that city.

Moore’s intervention wasn’t only inspired by the struggles for water outside of the United States. People in her home state of Wisconsin successfully blocked a bill that would have fast-tracked water privatization by removing a public-vote requirement. Just last month, Moore traveled to Flint to hear firsthand from families affected by the lead contamination caused by corrupt management of that city.

The situation in Flint, Moore says, "demands swift and effective action from federal, state, and local stakeholders.” But as Moore explains, “It also begs of us in positions of influence to take a broader look at the world around us to help identify similar problems.”

Globally, access to water is threatened when those in power treat water as a business, not a public right. The IFC openly markets such an approach to water delivery, using various buzzwords like privatization, “public-private partnerships” and “full-cost recovery.” But, regardless of how they spin it, the results are the same: people lose.

Rep. Gwen Moore’s bold stance this week will likely compel others to take action and demand answers. Ultimately, given that the lives and well-being of millions around the world are at stake, there is no other option. If we are to ensure that everyone has access to water, the World Bank must not only address this conflict of interest, it must abandon its blind pursuit of water privatization and other models that undermine democratic control.

Spontaneous abortion, also known as miscarriage, is an ordinary yet important part of normal reproduction; one of several ways nature promotes healthy babies who grow up to have babies of their own. But among the caribou of northern Alberta, Canada and the orcas of the Pacific Northwest, abortion has become alarmingly common.

Plastic in the oceans also directly impacts food chains, and consequently, human and animal health. "The ocean is basically a toilet bowl for all of our chemical pollutants and waste in general," Chelsea Rochman, a conservation research fellow at the University of California, Davis, told NPR’s Eliza Barclay.

Rochman, who authored a 2013 study about how ingested plastic harms the liver function of fish, knows all about how hazardous materials can work their way from the natural environment to our dinner plates. "Eventually, we start to see those contaminants high up in the food chain, in seafood and wildlife,” she says.

Clearly, we need to stop putting so much plastic in the ocean. One group that is trying to help us do just that is the Ocean Recovery Alliance, a nonprofit based in Los Angeles and Hong Kong that is developing projects that focus on plastic waste reduction to help improve the ocean environment. I had the chance to ask director and cofounder Doug Woodring some questions about the scope of the marine plastic trash issue, some of the coordinated efforts being made to stem the tide and what we all can do to help reverse this global ecological crisis.

Reynard Loki: How would you characterize the plastic trash crisis facing the world's oceans?  

Doug Woodring: It’s not slowing, due to growing populations and consumption. And there is insufficient recycling and waste infrastructure to go along with the use of new materials—mainly plastic—which change the way machines and equipment work. There are good opportunities here for job creation and creating value from this material, but our systems of collection and recovery are not good enough—or keeping up to speed with the widespread use of plastic packaging and material. Sadly, this gets into our environment and stays there.

It is one of the biggest challenges of our time, due to the complexity of the material. It doesn’t mean it can’t be tackled, but today’s current global mindset is not yet focused enough on this to deliver the broad and scaled solutions that are needed. For more about this, see my article in the Economist from last year that compares cleaning up the world's oceans to the "broken windows" theory of policing in high-crime neighborhoods.

RL: What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about plastic?

DW: That it doesn’t matter. That it goes away. That it doesn’t cause damage. That it doesn’t impact them. That their littering won’t make a big difference. That all plastic floats. (Actually almost 70 percent sinks.) Also, that just because there’s a nice recycling symbol on the bottom of a container, it will somehow get recycled. In fact, that symbol only means that it can be recycled—provided the city you live in is able to handle that material and you make sure it gets to a recycling center by disposing of it properly. The sad truth is that 90 percent of all plastic actually doesn’t get recycled.

RL: What are a few of the most staggering facts and figures that can help people understand the scope of this problem?

DW: In 2009, we went on an expedition to the North Pacific Gyre with Scripps Oceanography. We were the first in the world to sample fish there to 700 meters deep. Ten percent of all the small fish had plastic in their stomachs. This number might not seem so high, but when the scientists calculated the fish population there, and what they might be eating based on that 10 percent, in a year, the number was estimated at 12,000 to 24,000 tons per year. Of course the fish might pass the plastic, but if the plastic is carrying third-party toxins, that can get into the fish’s flesh. I believe others have found that over 85 percent of all seabirds tested have plastic in them.

Sadly, all animals, big or small, from mussels to whales, and even goats, cows, dogs and cats, will all eat plastic if they can get it in their mouths. They just don’t know better.

RL: What are some of the marine species that are having the most problems with plastic trash?   

DW: Over 700 species are known to suffer from impacts. There is no “body count” in the ocean, so we don’t know. Turtles are very susceptible to plastic bags as they look like jellyfish.

RL: Are there any coordinated international efforts to stem this tide and what is Ocean Recovery doing specifically?

DW: It’s a huge problem and requires localized solutions. There is no easy slam-dunk solution, as each river or stream or outlet is a transport channel for pollution (both solid and effluent). We have two of the only programs that exist, globally, which do not require bans, taxes or legislative changes—both were announced at the Clinton Global Initiative, and have been endorsed by UNEP and the World Bank. One is the Plastic Disclosure Project, which is like carbon and water reporting. You can’t manage well if you don’t measure it first.

The other is our Global Alert platform, an online tool and mobile app that gives anyone the ability to track trash hotspots via their computer or mobile phones, with photos, data and geotagging helping stakeholders in any watershed or coastal area to prevent, cleanup and manage plastic in and near the water. With Global Alert, citizens and school groups can easily “See, Share and Solve” their floating trash problems.