|
TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
______________________________________________________________________
CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Act to build resilience and adapt to eco-collapse
“It is a terrible irony that just as all the world’s attention was on bellicose threats from Trump, an official report [from British intelligence chiefs] demonstrates that even larger risks are posed by ecosystem collapse.
“Consider this key judgement from the report, which comes with ‘High’ confidence:
‘Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (i.e. irreversible loss of function beyond repair)’.
“And this inference that they draw from it:
‘Without significant increases in UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food’.
“It is meaningless to recognize the gravity of the impending climate/nature collapses without taking mutually self-protective action to build resilience and to adapt, strategically — which means building decarbonization and nature-recovery into one’s efforts throughout.”
Ill-conceived power makes enemies, squanders friends
“Systems scientists have been warning for decades that the current growth-based world economic order is unsustainable, and that it will inevitably become smaller and more simplified during the remainder of the 21st century. This downsizing is likely to be messy and sometimes violent.
“What is surprising is that this unraveling of the old order is accelerating so suddenly. During the last couple of decades, experts discussed whether the ‘Great Unraveling’ would be a slow erosion over decades or a fast disintegration over mere years. The latest evidence tips the scales toward a faster collapse scenario.
“Since this shift is being driven largely by Donald Trump, it’s natural to wonder whether international calm could be restored simply by shunting him aside. There is, after all, growing concern over Trump’s health — His daytime sleepiness, his slurred speech, and his frequent fumbling for the correct word.
“The US Constitution provides two methods for removing an unfit president: impeachment, and the invocation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Few informed observers expect either of these remedies to be implemented soon.
“In this article we’ll explore how and why the march toward collapse is hastening, and what this trend has to do with Trump’s failure to understand social power. We’ll also explore what individuals can do in response to increasing signs of societal instability.
“Every large society has had to master three elements of social power — i.e., enlist the populace to fight wars, build significant structures and institutions, and increase economic activity. Typically, people respond to coercion, enticements, and persuasion. If these are the three elements of social power, then the three main tools of social power are weapons, money, and communication technologies.
“There are two basic types of social power — vertical and horizontal. Vertical power is top-down, exercised through threats and bribes: ‘you must do this, or else’, or ‘if you do this, I’ll give you that’. Horizontal power is mutual and cooperative: ‘we can do this together’.
“Trump seems reflexively to rely solely on vertical social power — the use of threats and bribes. Trump seems profoundly ignorant of, or indifferent to, horizontal power. He has squandered the goodwill of allies and needlessly created international enemies.
“Local action to build community resilience is the antidote to national and global unraveling. Notice the persistent bonds of horizontal power holding your community together and engage in activities that build social ties. Strengthen local institutions, from credit unions to food co-ops. Our friends at Shareable have developed a fantastic set of guides — Mutual Aid 101.”
Unsubscribe, opt-out from Big Tech, AI, Musk — all of February
“Economic boycotts are a familiar tool of protest. The problem is they often place the greatest strain on the smallest businesses. That was the case during Friday’s nationwide general strike. There may, however, be another way, according to Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University famous for his critiques of Big Tech.
“Instead of a blanket shutdown, Galloway is calling for Americans to focus on major tech companies by unsubscribing from — or opting out of — services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Amazon’s Prime Video, and Microsoft Office. A targeted boycott starting on Sunday and lasting the entire month of February could move markets, he says.
“‘We’re proposing something quieter and less cinematic, but much more disturbing to the Trump administration. A one-month slump is terrifying’, he wrote in a blog post announcing the boycott. ‘Real change always comes from the American people, not from our political parties. But power doesn’t fear protests nearly as much as economic withdrawals. The most radical act in a capitalist society isn’t marching — it’s not spending’.
“Among the first steps are unsubscribing from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. If enough people cut spending on AI, it could spill over to other companies, including Nvidia and Microsoft. You could also unsubscribe from a range of other tech offerings — Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Uber. And hold off on buying your next iPhone or Mac.
“Then document your decisions on Instagram — we’d target this platform, too, but we need some way to spread the message nationwide.”
The roots of agroforestry
“Fifty years before Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term permaculture, Joseph Russel Smith wrote the book Tree Crops, a Permanent Agriculture (1929). Smith was particularly focused on the hill country where tilled crops were destroying the land. His travels abroad inspired an idea for using perennial tree crops in the hills for both food and erosion control.
“Fast forward to the present day where Smith’s theory of utilizing tree crops — perennial bean, nut, and fruit trees which build the soil community rather than destroying it — is way overdue.
“The first nineteen pages of Tree Crops had — and still has — revolutionary ideas. Mollison and Holmgren mined Smith’s major points, embellished them with complexity and design principles, and wisely dumped the remainder. Smith’s analysis of the problem was correct. However, the specifics were typical of our short range, anthropocentric thinking.
“Smith’s main ideas were for the hill country, but are pertinent for the plains too. To summarize:
- Smith believed that agriculture must be adapted to the physical conditions of the area. But when he wrote that farming should fit the land he meant the crops for the plains were not suited for the hills.
- Smith saw erosion as the major problem facing American agriculture with crop trees the answer. The way annual crops were (and still are) grown left the soil exposed to erosion after the harvest.
- Smith encouraged using productive fruit, nut and bean trees on hillsides. Trees are the natural crop plants for all such places.
- Toward the end of the book, Smith mentions how to start a tree farm. Begin gradually. Do interplanting to provide early returns — quick-maturing species can be alternated with slow-maturing.
- Inspired and most importantly, he suggests that the development of two-story agriculture (trees above and annual crops below) offers interesting possibilities of a greater yield than can be had from a one-story agriculture.”
Petroleum spill in Alaskan National Petroleum Reserve
“When ConocoPhillips won federal approval last year to explore for oil in the Alaskan Arctic, environmental groups warned the proposal was rushed through without adequate protections. Last week, an oil rig toppled onto the tundra as it was on its way to drill for that effort, igniting a fire and spilling diesel fuel onto the snow-covered land.
“Now, five days after the incident, the weather is so severe that no crew is on site to respond to the spill. Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the U.S. District Court in Alaska denied a request by environmental groups for a preliminary injunction, allowing the exploration work to proceed. ‘Sadly, ConocoPhillips will now spend the winter disrupting caribou migration and crushing fragile Arctic tundra under massive thumper trucks’, said Matt Jackson of The Wilderness Society.
“The exploration program is pushing industrial activity deeper into the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, which has some of the largest wilderness areas in the United States, and into prime hunting and subsistence grounds used by Iñupiat residents of the nearby village of Nuiqsut.”
First Nations are leaders for small renewable electricity
“On the northwestern corner of Vancouver Island, BC, wind and storms will often rip through Quatsino Sound, meaning the Quatsino First Nation experiences frequent power outages. But that weather has also created opportunities.
“A wind farm opened in 2013, which the nation has partial ownership in, and Quatsino is on the cusp of completing the third and final phase of its 150-kilowatt solar project in the spring. Quatsino estimates the solar panels will save the nation over $18,000 annually through reduced BC Hydro usage by the daycare, administration building and school.
“But Quatsino isn’t stopping there — it is pushing to deploy a tidal energy system later this year, which would be one of the first pilot projects of that technology on the west coast. Through its energy projects, the nation aims to provide reliable power at lower costs to its population of roughly 600 people, along with bringing jobs and independence.
“Many First Nations across B.C. have ambitions to pursue renewable energy, but are hindered by a lack of capacity and funding opportunities. In response, the province has created new funds, and BC Hydro required 25 per cent Indigenous equity in applications to its 2024 and 2025 calls for power.”
Gifting dissolves any semblance of separateness
“In the late 1970s, one of the most formative books that I encountered was Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social relationships wrought by gifts and their karmic ramifications.
“Hyde showed how gift exchange is a ubiquitous social phenomenon for forging and maintaining reciprocal relationships in their functioning as commons. Hyde cites many examples – blood banks, organ donation systems, Indigenous culture, and countless artistic contexts.
“The Gift was illuminating for me in showing how circuits of gift-exchange operate with very different social logics and values than capitalist culture. Hyde is quick to note that his book was a way of making sense of the tensions of trying to be an artist in a capitalist society that reflexively commodifies everything.
“Hyde brilliantly excavates from history many stories of invention (Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod and wood stove), intergenerational borrowing (Bob Dylan of Woody Guthrie’s folk music), and scientific research (the Human Genome Project’s attempt to keep genome sequences in the public domain), all of which expose capitalist mythologies about individual genius and creativity at the expense of collective influences.”
Loving degrowth, living degrowth, being degrowth
“Ever since the fall of 2023 when Jason Hickel’s Less Is More so moved me that I began organizing fellow degrowthers in Taipei to explore how we might bring about degrowth. After years of quiet, I was finally ready to throw my energy into the transformation of degrowth.
“In the summer of 2021, after weathering a couple health crises, I stopped everything. I dove deep within and ‘Marie Kondo-ed’ not just my things, but also relationships, patterns, habits — my energy. So when degrowth came across my path, I recognized it like a kindred spirit. Yes!
“Newly awakened, I poured myself into these self-organized degrowth meetings that, over many months, sprouted a book club and a university course on degrowth. What I did not notice was that I had put myself on the Doing Doing Doing track that leads to burnout. Degrowth had become part of my identity. I was trying to persuade a lot, and edging ever closer to becoming a righteous degrowth scold.
“I was Doing, not Being. Around the same time, I was starting to see the intransigence of the system, that collapse of this system is already underway. and that more people are awake to the system than might know the term ‘degrowth’’.
“What I am realizing is, Being connects us with our hearts, with love, and opens up our energy to flow. It really is about energy. ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel’, said Maya Angelou.
“It’s also about timing. Same for me with degrowth. These days I remind myself of the importance of timing whenever I’m tempted to persuade someone about degrowth. No need to push — it will click when the timing is right.”
Fail-safe nuclear reactor? — are you a gambler?
“For more than three decades I was the director of grants for a science foundation. My attention increasingly turned toward news about huge nuclear power plant disasters. I recognized that much of the reporting on these nuclear issues was contradictory, misleading, or incorrect, especially in the lay press — a trend that continues today.
“Trump plans to build 10 new nuclear reactors as soon as 2030. He is simultaneously laying off more than 2,000 Department of Energy staffers — including Nuclear Security Administration employees. Oh, and he’s simultaneously decapitating $22 billion in clean energy projects canceled just this year.
“Megacompanies investing billions in partnerships with nuclear plant owners to accommodate their energy-guzzling AI ambitions include Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. There’s no such thing as a fail-safe nuclear plant, but these profit-making companies are prepared to take the gamble.
“Reactor owners are limited to $500 million liability for damages by the Price Anderson Act. Retroactive insurance-payment increases can raise coverage, but ultimately the federal government — i.e., the taxpayer — covers damages that rise to hundreds of billions of dollars.
“Estimates of Fukushima’s cleanup costs start at about $540 billion. But with the 30-40 year duration of the cleanup — costs will soar to 23.4 trillion yen or $1.6 trillion. An estimated 880 tons of radioactive fuel debris remains at the Fukushima plant and the release of treated, radioactive waters will go on for at least 30 years.
“The most radioactively polluted site in the world is the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state, launched in 1944 and still home to 53 million gallons of nuclear waste. Cleanup estimates range from $364 billion to $589 billion.”
|
