Do you believe in miracles? If so, please form an orderly queue. Plenty of people imagine we can carry on as we are, as long as we substitute one material for another. Last month, a request to Starbucks and Costa to replace their plastic coffee cups with cups made from corn starch was retweeted 60,000 times, before it was deleted.

Those who supported this call failed to ask themselves where the corn starch would come from, how much land would be needed to grow it, or how much food production it would displace. They overlooked the damage this cultivation would inflict: growing corn (maize) is notorious for causing soil erosion, and often requires heavy doses of pesticides and fertilisers.

The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability. Or, to put it another way, the problem is pursuing, on the one planet known to harbour life, a four-planet lifestyle. Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth’s living systems.

...

We are kept remarkably ignorant of such issues. As consumers, we are confused, bamboozled and almost powerless – and corporate power has gone to great lengths to persuade us to see ourselves this way. The BBC’s approach to environmental issues is highly partisan, siding with a system that has sought to transfer responsibility for structural forces to individual shoppers. Yet it is only as citizens taking political action that we can promote meaningful change.

The answer to the question “How should we live?” is: “Simply.” But living simply is highly complicated. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the government massacred the Simple Lifers. This is generally unnecessary: today they can safely be marginalised, insulted and dismissed. The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.

One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.

As last month’s Hothouse Earth paper, which warned of the danger of flipping the planet into a new, irreversible climatic state, concluded: “Incremental linear changes … are not enough to stabilise the Earth system. Widespread, rapid and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold.”

Disposable coffee cups made from new materials are not just a non-solution: they are a perpetuation of the problem. Defending the planet means changing the world.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/06/save-earth-disposa...

-----------------

Our manufactured greed and convenience isn't going to change, unless our house is burnt to the ground — and even then we might not accept our responsibility in the caper, as we blame the next door neighbour for having ten kids.

Today one headline on page 3 in the Sydney Morning Herald says it all: 

'Revved up': Land being cleared at the rate of 14 football fields a day in northern NSW (Land clearing 'triple' after law change).

Meanwhile we worry about football boofheads showing their arse and behaving like pigs "at a venue"...

I do not believe in miracles.

George, tell your "relatives", the Lord Lawson clan and his awful friend, Lord Monckton, to fuck off.

See also: 

and many more articles on this site, including:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

Changing the "weight" of parameters on the environment of the planet through human activities is akin to the Penrose explanation of "quantum superimposition".

Gus is pushing the envelope here, but bear with me. 

The only part of the planet we are interested in at this level is the thin surface of the earth. The whole bio-activity on this planet is a very very thin layer, at most about 13 kilometre thick (about 10 kilometres of atmosphere and an average of 3,000 metres of sea and its deepest locked-up carbon sinks). All the equations of survival and extinction are contained within this.

To say the least, it is a precarious surface that has modified, stabilised and changed again, under the vagaries of molecular development we know as life and interstellar encounters such as meteorites and comets — for at least 4.6 billion years. Presently, the molecular development know as humans is changing the surface. It would be silly not to recognise this.

Adapting the Penrose understanding of space and energy which more or less states that above a certain threshold, superimpositions of mass and energy will create gravitational distortions of space that cannot be sustained. This is how "wave function collapse" happens.

Gus is not claiming here that human activities will create "gravitational distortions". But should we consider the biosphere as a wave function, in which all is dependant of the other, the more weight added by human activities, such as CO2, poisons and rubbish, the more chance we are likely to encounter a "wave function collapse".

This is explained practically by placing objects on a cloth say held above ground by its sides or corners. One small object will create a small indentation in the fabric. Add another small object on another part of the cloth and it will do another indentation in the cloth. Make the objects heavier and there will be a point at which the TWO INDENTATIONS WILL BECOME ONE. This is when the "wave function collapses". 

The surface of the earth is like a big cloth and the many human activities have been like little pebbles on it, creating small local distortions. At this stage, human activities have INCREASED in size due to the demand of the capitalist system — and may I be brave — GLOBALISATION. There will be a time when the heavier demands by human activities on the surface of the planet will join up and the WAVE FUNCTION OF LIFE WILL COLLAPSE.

THIS IS INEVITABLE under the way we treat the place presently. The wave function collapse is a threshold, that is to say, there is a sudden tipping point.

Tell your friends ...

Read from top and laughing while we still can... 

Swiss voters are casting their ballots in not one, but two votes which campaigners say will promote ethical and sustainable food. 

The votes follow scandals in the last few years over horse meat in lasagne and the destruction of rain forests to make way for palm oil and cattle ranching.

And they reflect growing consumer interest - not just in Switzerland but across Europe - in where food comes from and how it is produced.

Switzerland's system of direct democracy means campaigners simply have to gather 100,000 signatures to ensure a nationwide vote on a political issue.

The first proposal, called "fair food", wants more government support for sustainable, animal friendly products - and more detailed labelling so consumers know what they are getting.

It also calls for a crackdown on food waste, and for imports to meet Swiss standards on workers' conditions, environmental safety, and animal welfare. 

This would mean Swiss inspectors checking foreign food producers for compliance.

The second, called "food sovereignty" goes even further, calling for much greater state support for local family farms, for higher tariffs on food imports, and for foreign produce that does not meet Swiss standards to be banned.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe

Read from top

Here Gus analyses JEDEDIAH PURDY's study of Thoreau who, according to Gus, was only a tiny pebble in the pond of human illusions.

-----------------

In Defense of Thoreau

He may have been a jerk, but he still matters.

JEDEDIAH PURDY

…

I've been wondering, though, whether we can't have a Thoreau for the Anthropocene, a Thoreau who is less interested in wilderness than in how to live with, relate to and value a world we have irrevocably changed, a world where nothing is really separate from us. I like this idea because the Anthropocene needs its own cultural history, its environmental texts. Whatever its limitations, Thoreau's writing contains some of the richest American reflection on humane living in a living world. It is a lot of baby to toss out with the pre-Anthropocene bathwater.

It turns out, too, that an Anthropocene Thoreau is more than wishful thinking. Actually, the wilderness Thoreau is something of a truncated distortion, what Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau's friend and landlord, might have called "the dwarf of himself." It was John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club and a giant publicist of giant, wild landscapes, who switched Thoreau's "wildness" to literal wilderness. Thoreau used "wildness" to refer to a quality he found in Shakespeare's language, Greek myth and the swamps outside Concord, just to name a few; Muir adapted the slogan so that it would later fit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). By the time the Wilderness Society made Thoreau part of its stump speech for the 1964 Wilderness Act, he was hopelessly tied to trackless, depopulated places ― the kinds of places he hardly saw or wrote about during a lifetime in New England.

With this in mind, some time ago I re-read Walden , trying to see it through Anthropocene eyes, as a book that has to live in a world that is violently and thoroughly changed. Turns out that wilderness isn't in it. Walden takes place, quite self-consciously, in a landscape transformed by long and intensive habitation. Thoreau tells us that the woods around the pond have been cleared, that boats have sunk to its bottom, that it is regularly harvested for ice. His Concord is full of the artefacts of old and new settlement, down to the soil itself, seeded with stone tools and potsherds that tinkle against his hoe as he works his bean-field.

What was most striking, though, was finding that Thoreau's most Transcendentalist (or Romantic) moments, the ones proclaiming that the human mind and the natural world are braided in continuous harmony, are inspired by the very opposite of wilderness. These pronouncements, which made Thoreau such an apt saint for later environmentalists, come in Walden as responses to places where the world is ruptured, broken, split open by human powers. Thoreau's Romanticism, in a way, was always Anthropocene.

Henry David Thoreau was an asshole, Kathryn Schulz tells us in an irresistibly polemical New Yorker essay. He was, in fact, a miserable asshole, a man of “pinched and selfish motives,” who was “narcissistic, fanatical about self-control,” humorless, consumed by “comprehensive arrogance,” and “as parochial as he was egotistical.”

And the writing he is best remembered for sucks.

Walden is “an unnavigable thicket of contradiction,” “fundamentally adolescent in tone,” which limps along with the weight of an eighty-page opening chapter that “must be one of the highest barriers to entry in the Western canon: dry, sententious, condescending.”

Schulz’s indictment opens with Thoreau visiting a shipwreck site just outside Cohasset Harbor, on the Massachusetts coast, where the deaths of some hundred Irish immigrants and ship’s crew members left him cold, and he found, after viewing the bloated bodies, that he “sympathized rather with the winds and waves.” She concludes with the crushing blow of pity: “Poor Thoreau: He, too, was the victim of a kind of shipwreck—for reasons of his own psychology, a castaway from the rest of humanity.”

Read from top.