Tag: anthropocene

Solastalgia In The Late Anthropo Scene

By the mid 70s, I had harbored a belief that frenetic societal norms were approaching a tipping point. Unfortunately, I did not turn that gnawing Angst into a Greta Thunberg moment. Since that time, generational thieves continue to place the young closest to the brink. The wealthiest of the most privileged draw up CYA plans, such as keeping a pilot on call and insuring that the bunkers stay well stocked and well armed.

Solastalgia: a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change.

An item from today’s (28 May 2019) New York Times:

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

Everyday ecologies slip away every day and every where. My particular “where” is in a fly-over State, the point where Ohio and Kentucky meet Indiana.

What I saw a generation ago, that I do not (or very seldom) see now:

  • fire flies,
  • grubs,
  • moles,
  • mole hills,
  • ants crawling up a tree,
  • skunks,
  • inch worms,
  • bag worms,
  • bees,
  • native flora,
  • native-blossoming trees,
  • diverse wild birds,
  • earthworms in puddles,
  • butterflies,
  • moths,
  • groundhog colonies,
  • snakes,
  • water bugs,
  • locusts,
  • praying mantises

Cicadas flew by the billions here in 2004. Will they hatch in 2021?

Plastic molecules form islands in every ocean, plastics permeate lungs and digestive tracts, they extend to the peak of Everest (see photo below) and drop into the Marianna Trench. Sea life ingests those products manufactured using fossil fuels, transported with fossil fuels. Furious resource-extraction teams purchase ice-breaking ships to the Arctic for rare minerals needed in throwaway electronics.

An urgent suggestion: stop eating fish — and all other sentient things. Industrial nets extending 75 miles behind enormous tankers cull sea life efficiently enough to shorten the intervals between individual eco-extinctions.

Did you know that Greta Thunberg is vegan? She confronts eco-criminals with action plans that address the root of the problem. It’s not Climate Change, it’s not Climate Crisis, it’s nothing less than a Climate Emergency.

Go Vegan like there’s no tomorrow.

Take “Scale Mt Everest” off your plastic-bucket list.

Bad ideas:

  • Accumulating crap,
  • wasting lives by consuming them,
  • trashing lives for folly, fashion, fad, or geopolitical advantage,
  • frenzied shopping experiences,
  • joining traffic jams on the highways if avoidable,
  • frenetic frequent flying,
  • idling your ass in a drive-thru for the In and Out of it all,
  • ingesting the toxins that dwell in fast food,
  • tossing single-use plastic utensils and drinking straws,
  • salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, secret sauce, soy, sugar… packets into an environment already fulsomely (my favorite word) thick with them.

Thanks for reading.

Vegetarianism and veganism. What gives?

A vegetarian ingests an animal’s personal effects by consuming merely eggs, milk and/or cheese — highly addictive substances that keep addicts coming back for more. It takes commitment and some patience while your body excretes toxins, but it’s also enormously rewarding. Immeasurably if you have genuine compassion for animals and remember that we ain’t nothing but mammals.

Learning to Think in the Anthropocene

Calfs get separated from their mothers at birth. Her breast milk is diverted to a marketplace. Oddly enough, a cow’s milk is designed for her offspring. Imagine if you can. There is no weaning process, just immediate separation of mother and calf.

Sir, would you please direct me to the supermarket’s breast-milk cooler?

Unfortunately, a vegetarian ends up causing more cruelty than a “meat” eater who eats only meat. When chickens and cows can no longer produce the goods for the dairy industry they are shipped to a slaughter houses for marginal return on investment.

As a veganist, I advocate formal legal recognition of the inalienable rights of all sentient animals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Animals are not a necessary “resource” for a becoming life. We become inured our entire lives to the unspeakable violence that attends denial of these rights — multiple times per day for most non-vegan humans.

Look at a chart of “cuts” in a butcher shop. Connect the dots to Grey’s Anatomy. We share virtually the same vital organs, virtually the same body systems: from head to toe and wrapped in the largest organ of all, the skin. Skin keeps the organs protected from the elements. You are what you eat.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals.

Humans once lived in harmony with this planet — some time after the fifth extinction event ended reptilian species that evolved over 200,000,000 years. By comparison, human have evolved for only 200,000 years. That should humble us, but I don’t think we are terribly modest in our self-estimation. Having an extinction event named after ourselves — The Anthropocene — is not a cause for celebration.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals. Who knows what might follow an Anthropocene?

Thanks for reading.


Food Chain Toppers

Fifty years ago I taught climatology labs for first-year geography students. The department was fortunate enough to have a $1,000 Monroe electronic calculator that featured the same functionality as those in The Dollar Tree’s Electronics Department now. The Monroe couldn’t even calculate square roots. Fortunately, my slide rule could. Plate tectonics was still an outlier. On the other hand, science was not despised and broadly distrusted. 

But we’re living in more modern times, are we not? There were gullible people in 1969, Nixon moved into the White House. There are gullible people in 2018, Trump is still occupying the White House. Israel is still occupying Palestine. Racism is still alive and fell, still socially sanctioned.  

The Windshield Effect. Why are there no dead bugs on my windshield?

In 1969 your car windshield got badly bugged on the highway. If you did not regularly scrub the car’s grill, headlamps and radiator blades you would eventually regret it. Now I don’t even hear crickets when I enter a room.

“Entomologists also knew that climate change and the eventual destruction of global habitat are bad news for biodiversity in general and that insects are dealing with the particular challenges posed by herbicides and pesticides, along with the effects of losing meadows, forests and even weedy patches to the relentless expansion of human spaces.”

The Insect Apocalypse

Ecosystems are resilient, but so is that proverbial camel with one straw too many on her back.

Anthropocentrism threatens Planet Earth with an extinction event, appropriately known as the Anthropocene. Anthropospherians consider themselves above the brutish razor-thin line that evolution enforces effectively. A breakthrough a day keeps crises at bay.


“I saw something somewhere or other about how we might have to eat insects to get our protein. I don’t think I could do that myself, you know? Effing weird. Yuck”

Yuck, as in finding a hair in your food.

BizarroComics.Com


Meat is a socially sanctified addiction, but its addicts do not recognize the addictive aspect enough to go into detox. Animal husbandry is socially sanctified torture of live stock, performed by proxy at a supermarket.

Some Carnivoreseurs will eat animals that haven’t even died yet. Adventuresome Carnivoreseurs beam proudly at their adventuresome palates. Food Network stalwarts they are.

Serving twitching fish to patrons

Of course, it will bother you if you keep thinking about it. But is it enough to give thanks to the animal for donating their mortal souls to those with (presumably) eternal souls? In other words, it’s no big deal to kill for dietary purposes or because the animal simply tastes good.

Extreme eating is so cool, isn’t it? You’ve got to give it to them. Now, watch them closely as they wash down that writhing catch with some Effen Vodka. The fish will probably like the vodka too. Ha Ha. Very funny, Edgar.

The proper study of mankind I shall leave to possible extraterrestrial research teams. Science aficionados perhaps. 

Thanks for reading.

Dominion and Domestication News

Breaking news from our time-traveling reporters, recently returned from a special assignment for The Genesis Tattler and World Report:

The 26th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis (NIV) declares animal rights alienable, subservient to the inalienable rights of mankind (the ones created in His image and likeness). In a single sentence, a sentencing I say, the English translation describes

  1. the creation of mankind,
  2. the wild creatures in the sea,
  3. in the sky,
  4. on the land,
  5. and the livestock.

So farmed animals get exiled from wild animals in one fell swath.

genesis.1.26

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

How about this logical leap: encaging every living being from tapeworm to giraffe between two commas — declaring the deed done in fewer than seven words. …Let us make mankind in our image

,in our likeness,

so that they may rule over…

I’m assigning another time-traveling team to the gates of Eden to report on the couple caught trafficking forbidden fruit: advice of a snake-oil-sales demon guised as a serpent, possibly a slitherer subservient (subserpient?) to the inalienably privileged pair. The devil is in the details.

Bill, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all. 

It’s not really what I say that counts, it’s what I do. I DO VEGAN.

Speaking of saying something good, is it even possible to be a good person, to eat peas, live long and prosper? Not only to prosper, but to thrive without executing the calf and hardening the arteries, those tubes hat flow lifeblood into and out of your heart, possibly to head off an extinction event named after its instigator. While researching this article I happened upon a quite fascinating site that speaks to a potential extinction event : Misanthropocene

misanthropocene

A few thoughts for future posts:

The hegemony of man as misogynist.

Where do humans fit on the scale running from sadism to masochism?

Are humans a selfish specie?

One self-adoring philosopher, Ayn Rand,  is my choice for single most influential human responsible for stoking the boilers of the Anthropocene Express. Git ‘er done, Ayn. Here is a Rand quote from 1974:

They (Native Americans) didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

— Q and A session following her address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974 – found in Endgame: Resistance, by Derrick Jensen, Seven Stories Press, 2006, pg 220

I sign off with the words of Anthony Douglas Williams:

When I look into the eyes of an animal, I do not see an animal, I see a living being, I see a friend, I feel a Soul.

The eyes have it.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

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