A number of books have been published recently, each speaking about environmental catastrophe with greater urgency and depth. I’ve just begun to read The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells.
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.
None of this is true.
In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.
It was carbon burning in eighteenth-century England that lit the fuse of everything that has followed. But that is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today—and unfairly. The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War II, the figure is about 85 percent. The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime—the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral.
That is the course we are speeding so blithely along—to more than four degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2100. According to some estimates, that would mean that whole regions of Africa and Australia and the United States, parts of South America north of Patagonia, and Asia south of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable by direct heat, desertification, and flooding. Certainly it would make them inhospitable, and many more regions besides.
Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 3-6). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
I wonder what the rest of the book will say, and if I want to know. But we have to know, so we can understand the urgency of trying to attenuate the oncoming crises.
What is so discouraging to me is how more than half of the carbon injected into the atmosphere was done in just the last 30 years. I’m afraid people often think I’m congratulating myself when I talk about not having a personal automobile for the past 45 years. Rather, I see it as a failure to not having found ways to get more people to do the same. An Iowa Quaker recently responded, “we can’t seem to escape the flaws of human nature, can we?”
Is there any hope to at least slow down how rapidly environmental destruction will occur? To somehow limit the extent of the damages we are facing? I had thought we could build sustainable communities here in the Midwest, where good soil and water would allow us to feed ourselves. But the current extreme flooding here makes even that seem problematic.
Still, what gives me hope today is the passion of the youth of the Sunrise Movement who are building political and people power to force discussions and work on the ideas of a Green New Deal. I think this is the answer to my frustrations of having failed to convince more people in the past to give up personal automobiles. These youth have managed to get large numbers of people to begin to turn away from burning fossil fuels, and create more just communities in the process. I hope you will learn about and work to bring about a Green New Deal. One way to do that in Iowa is to attend the Green New Deal Tour that is coming to Des Moines this April 22.
At each tour stop, hundreds to thousands of attendees are treated to a multimedia experience and an emotional journey.
Road to a Green New Deal Tour
We’ll share stories about how the crises of climate change and inequality are threatening the people and places we call home. We’ll hear from political leaders about how the Green New Deal would protect communities across the country from the worsening impacts of climate change while boosting our economy. Then we’ll lay out the plan to make the 2020 election a referendum on the Green New Deal, so we can make the Green New Deal law in 2021.
Speakers will include political leaders who are championing the effort for the Green New Deal in Congress, movement leaders mobilizing thousands to join the fight, and local community leaders who are leading the way to the transition to a society that works for all of us and protects the air we breathe, water we drink, and places we call home.
Student activists with the Sunrise Movement occupy Nancy Pelosi’s office to demand that she and the Democrats act on climate change 
Sunrise Movement No Excuses protest on Capitol Hill, Washington DC Offices visited Hakeem Jeffries and Steny Hoyer. 
Quakers, social justice and revolution 
interesting and very very thoughtful piece
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Thanks for sending this. See you Saturday!
The first paragragh listed above from ‘The uninhabitable Earth’
by David Wallace-Wells, is one of the best prefaces I’ve ever
read on the subject, and I would only suggest that without a
plethora of questions and answers that rise to those questions,
it may be too strong for younger minds to comprehend and or
perceive a way that humanity can thread that needle and exist;
ergo, they may give into the corporate structure’s convolution’s
devolutionary direction’s easy outs, like apathy, cynism,
delusional opt-ins like “science and technology will fix it”,
etc., when supposed science has no intentions of ever being
more than the religion of scientism to profit, pleasure and
empower it’s adherrents in ever-increasingly cyclical and
centralizing patterns (in a word, more), etc.. Of course
addictive personality disorder, and consumerism also come to
mind. You see, while knowledge always has a concurrent
responsibility to usually give it away, it also demands
accuracy in it’s growth and applications. An example, WWII
was won by the Allies by sheer luck, my saying this in no way
is meant to diminish the astronomical sacrifices of the
Allies and their Allied countries. For the criminal insanity
of a dozen German scientists was not what their Hitlers,
Hirohitos, Mussolinis, and Francos demanded at the time. So,
those scientists fleed, half to the West, half to the East,
in a last ditched effort to stop the most criminally insane
Hitler; successfully, as history bears out. Yet, humanity
was at that precipice of definitive extinction at the hands
of the notsees, but for those scientists discerning what it
was to be human more accurately over time; and that they
weren’t doing it- and chose to instead. Simply, if Hitler
would have had the A-bomb, etc., instead of the Allies,
humanity would’ve been extinct decades ago. Yet, with the
victory for life itself that the scientists handed the
Allies they also handed them the utter criminal insanity of
such a thing as a ‘science’ that is “pure” and somehow
“separate” from anything else; an entity unto itself that
need not be justified in it’s actions- as they were
definable as empirical, etc.. Thus the criminal insanity
of the Axis powers scientists, especially the Germans,
continued in it’s form, yet, not it’s content; somehow,
thereby, being deemed palatable to politicians, world
leaders, etc.- for now the criminal insanity was in the
correct hands, supposedly, the united suck of assassins
having it All would deter, if not stop other countries
from becoming that criminal insane, etc.. So, if you
look at that historical set of causes and effects, it’s
almost impossible to come up with a scenario where
humanity isn’t again at that precipice of extinction
from supposed science; that while almost no one knows
it? One might ask, how could humanity not know what’s
causing it’s extinction, yet, that’s where the
seamlesssness of the corporate structure’s convolution
comes in. So, 400 years of supposed science have
brought what it took the Galaxy to create and evolve
over billions of years, the Earth and life on it, to
the precipice of extinction; like “…one insect
damaging so much grain…” (Elton John), or one
instant, in terms of the evolution, destroying so much
grace. Then one looks across the breadth and depth
of the spectrum of the multi-media conspiracy’s
communications and one sees, the conspiracy between
the bi-headed, RumputiN/vlad-the-impaler, bi-polar axi
of supposed global power, one, republican capitalist
notsees who are totalitarian and materialists and the
other Communist, Socialist, totalitarians that are
notsee and materialist, marginalizing to
exterminating dissenting views and actual scientific
ones too; like Darwin’s one of evolution- accepted
science for hundreds of years. Where are the
discernments being propagatedd that the evolutionary
direction is something, just as la machine’s
devolutionary direction is another entirely? How
come the word evolution is falsely used as synonymous
with process, etc.; and is never corrected- if the
word is used at all? Why has the supposed scientific
community never struggled against the completely
fallacious propistion that “humanity…”, supposedly,
“doesn’t have to evolve”, etc.; “it”, supposedly,
“just needs technological fixes that politicians
haven’t allowed to be applied”, etc.. Completely,
supposedly, exonerating supposed science of it’s
causing the extinctions and responsibility to stop
them in one felled swoop? Again, in a word, more.
If the scientific community switches to real science
they are diminishing their “almighty bottom line”,
getting more. Yet, anyone who knows anything knows
along with it comes responsibilities; why haven’t
All demanded they exercise theirs? Political will,
one might suggest is lacking, specifically, in each
individual citizen; how has the corporate
structure’s convolution’s devolutionary direction
successfully devolved everyone, individually? Now,
you’d be getting somewhere. This struggle for the
hearts, minds and souls of each person to be
emancipated from the worldly world’s, la machine’s,
illusory through to delusional sociological through
to societal programming is the key to threading that
needle. For if each one doesn’t reach and teach one
to turn 360 degrees around, back to the evolution
and the future humanity will only have if they do,
extinction’s the only posssibility; because it’s all
we ever actually chose. Certainly, illimitable,
potentially, you, indivisible as life, can do that;
no? A twig of poetree which softly elucidates 🙂
C’est La Unvie
A million monarchs lie dead, though,
No less sociological programming of
Upper-middle to rich classes with
Decadence, affluence, inclusion, is.
No less societal determination of
Middle to lower, being excluded by
Division and conquering, privation.
Yet, they, on wing no more, still fly
In our spirit’s eye, heal humanities’ heart.
While their silent cry echoes
The 33,000 species extinct each year,
A rate not seen since the last ice age
Ensued, does it move you?
Does your curiosity ask why?
Will you, on this 33rd Earth Day, allow
A tear for all life’s fallen? Consider
The losses economic apartheid incurs,
Mirrored by the divide humancentricity
Has levied? Our underlying duplicitous
Disregard for life, avarice and oil fueled,
Won’t abate for our existence, will you?
(For the beautiful butterflies, before the 31 st Earth Day)
If you will, please copy, share.
Matutinally Yours,
reality, james nordlund
Reblogged this on As' salaam Alaykem 🙂 Rahim.