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Earth Meanders
Insightful original Earth essays placing environmental sustainability within the context of other contemporary issues including peace, freedom, equity and justice
January 31, 2012
EARTH MEANDERS: On Violence and Earth Revolution
Imagining the human family coming together to take well considered, decisive, and minimally or non-violent action to sustain global ecology
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
Human Family’s Ecocidal Death Wish
The ecological foundation of being is unraveling before our very eyes. Without ecosystems there is no life. Fiercely loving Earth is the answer. Let's sustain global ecology together like our shared survival and abundance depends upon it. And while we set out using classic civil disobedience tactics, let’s not dismiss out of hand any obstruction, uncivil disobedience, sabotage and targeted insurgency tactics – that are non-terrorist – and that may be necessary to achieve global ecological sustainability. The human family’s shared survival depends upon passionately defending Earth using all means necessary.
Earth's ecosystems are collapsing under the burden of human growth, destroying our one shared biosphere that makes life possible. Industrial growth – frantically destroying ecosystems to feed insatiable, ever-growing appetites – is an aberration, a mistake, a disease. If left untreated, this will be the end of the human family, all life, and Earth's very being. Infinite economic growth at the expense of ecosystems is impossible, and seeking endless and inequitable growth in consumption and population can only lead to collapse and massive die-off.
Humanity’s last best chance to justly and equitably sustain a livable planet is to protect and restore ecosystems, end fossil fuels, and a people's power Earth revolution to utterly destroy the ecocidal industrial growth machine. We are all bloody fools to tolerate and not immediately overthrow a violently ecocidal system that is killing us all. If we all understood the implications of global ecosystem collapse, we would go now, together, and slay the global growth machine. It is too late to escape profound ecological decline, yet complete disastrous social and ecological collapse – and possible end to most or all life – may yet be avoided.
Sustaining ecology must become society’s central organizing principle or humans and all species face horrendous death. Globally it is time for radical change to simply survive converging ecology, food, war, water, inequity, population, climate, jobs, ocean, and extinction crises. It is deeply troubling most "environmentalists" deny the severity of ecosystem collapse, rejecting out of hand revolutionary measures sufficient to sustain ecology.
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December 8, 2011
EARTH MEANDERS: They Say It’s My Birthday… and I have a few wishes
Today is my birthday and it’s going to be a good time. So as I craft a day of mirth, free spirit and all my favorite activities, let me ruminate upon what I wish for as gifts on this special day.
I want peace on Earth, real peace, the kind where the armies demobilize and don’t remain standing like it used to be. Peace where trillions aren’t wasted from funding public social needs. I want a real and permanent turning of tanks into ploughshares. War’s obscene waste of energy, materials, human potential and life cannot persist if human and ecological being are to continue. I want it to end now.
The truth is we are one human family, one species, perhaps from different lineages with a crazy uncle, but a family nonetheless. And I want us to start acting like it. Nation state boundaries are a new false construct meant to divide us. As a human family I want our basic universal rights strictly and unconditionally observed. The human condition is absolute freedom as long as we don’t hurt others. I want gods and governments off of and out of my body.
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September 11, 2011
EARTH MEANDERS: 9/11/01 – The Day America Died
The 9/11 attacks were inhumane barbarity that brutally destroyed thousands. Yet America squandered the opportunity to unite the world against terrorism, instead going it alone to wage perma-war for a decade (permanent war, still on-going), causing tremendous lasting damage to life in America, our ideals, and world standing. In policies that can best be described as grotesque acts of revenge, hundreds of times the original victims of 9/11 were murdered by U.S. troops given illegal orders. Many if not most of the 300,000 to 1,000,000 killed were innocents – just as in the twin tower attacks. This is not the America where I was born and raised. If these militarist, fascist, morally and financially bankrupt policies and resultant collapse of ecology continue; the simpler, more honorable America has died, perhaps forever.
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
Introduction
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11 attacks upon America, I too mourn 3,000 victims of a monstrous criminal evil. Yet as a politically unaffiliated free thinker and global citizen, I am acutely aware that this was only the beginning of the decade’s violent criminal atrocities. I will not and cannot forget America’s dramatic and incautious over-reaction, as mostly decent countrymen and women lashed out with a murderous vengeance. Some 250,000 to one million have been killed in Iraq and about 50,000 in Afghanistan by America’s illegal wars and military aggression (some estimates run much higher). Why bring this up today? Because those that write history control our future, and the true story of American war crimes has not been told.
Post-911, America’s political leaders with vast public support, turned loose its vengeful legions and killing machines, in effect murdering – as occurs with all war deaths – at least 100 to 350 times as many innocents in Persia and Arabia as were lost in the twin towers. The vast majority of these casualties are innocent civilians that loved their children, worked, and prayed to their god just like their New York brethren. Given that several hundred thousand to a million innocent Middle East civilians have been murdered in a decade of American cold-blooded revenge for 9/11, this essay will ask whether this is enough and the wars of murderous vengeance can end now.
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August 10, 2011
EARTH MEANDERS: The Great Rainforest Heist: Greenpeace, WWF, RAN, FSC and REDD+ Conspiracy to Log Earth’s Last Primary Forests for Their Protection
By Earth Meanders, a project of Ecological Internet
CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry, glenbarry@ecologicalinternet.org
WHEN GOOD RAINFOREST GROUPS GO BAD you get monoculture and secondary forest plantations where ancient intact primary rainforests once stood, called sustainable forest management and carbon forestry, by BINGO’s (big NGOs) and United Nations greenwashers, paid for with your membership fees and taxes. Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is primary forest logging greenwash by money-sucking environmental bureaucracies. Rainforests and other old forest must be protected and restored for local and global ecology and local eco-development from standing forests.
Please donate now to Ecological Internet’s “End Primary Forest Logging Campaign” at http://www.rainforestportal.org/shared/donate/end_primary_forest_logging/ in order to help turn this draft document into a polished, photogenic, researched and footnoted report on BINGO’s Increased Old Forest Greenwash. Relax, there are typos, but wanted to get this out right now in draft.
INTRODUCTION
What would you say to me if I told you the world’s pre-eminent environmental organizations, widely perceived as the leading advocates for rainforests and old growth, have for decades been actively, indeed intimately, involved in logging the world’s last old forests. Would you call me a liar? Tell me I am mentally ill? Or because of the cognitive dissonance would you simply ignore me, thinking it impossible? Well here goes nothing…
There is a global conspiracy to log the Earth’s last primary forests – destroying ancient forests for disposable consumer items – while claiming it is “sustainable forest management” and “carbon forestry”. A number of public forest advocacy groups are going so far as to actually claim that industrial first-time primary forest logging is good for climate, ecosystems and local peoples.
July 25, 2011
EARTH MEANDERS: Ecology Bubble Bursts
End of ecosystems required for human habitat upon us, not many ways to sustain global ecology left
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
Ever since the human family embraced a growth based mentality and obsequious faith in liberal economics, we have witnessed a series of bubbles. The most recent boom-bust cycle has been the still unresolved financial and mortgage bubbles, but bubbles go as far back as the Dutch tulip mania of 1637. Exuberant yet clearly unsustainable growth, or inversely destruction, appears to be inherent to industrial, speculative, and growth obsessed capitalism. Bubbles represent the human proclivity for greed, to grow too fast, overshooting demand, while often exhausting key resources.
Global ecology, the biggest bubble of all, is now collapsing and will soon burst. Voracious economic and human growth have raged for three centuries upon the back of dismantling ecosystems globally. Humanity’s economic outputs have been over-valued relative to the ecologically mediated resources incautiously razed for their production. Earth’s carrying capacity - meaning ecology's finite ability to provide ecosystem services and absorb pollution – has been surpassed. Having grown beyond what Earth can bear, the human family is said to be in "overshoot", which can only lead to collapse.
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March 7, 2011
EARTH MEANDERS: Long Live the Cheddar Rebellion, We Are All Wisconsinites Now
On Wisconsin, forward, sift, winnow for freedom, worker and ecology rights
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
Global people's power rebellions sweeping Middle East and American states are our last best chance for shared abundance on a finite Earth. We are one human family with natural human rights to freedom, worker rights, ecological sustainability, equity, knowledge, truth and justice. This essay calls for continued protest, more civil disobedience and a general strike if necessary to achieve these ideals in Madison and the world.
In the late winter/very early spring of Cheesehead discontent, the Cheddar Rebellion in Wisconsin is resisting a corporate take-over of the state by the neo-Fascist wing of the GOP teabagger nuthouse. The new tyrannical Governor – Scott Walker – is bent upon stripping teachers and other public workers of their collective bargaining rights; pushing through massive tax breaks for corporations and the rich at the expense of education, unions, workers and the poor; and deregulating environmental protections while selling the state to corporate interests. I don't believe in Scott Walker's god or family values yet he sure as hell is ramming them down my/our throats. He and his ilk continually vilify teachers, firefighters and cops as slobs and thugs.
Darth Walker’s power grab manipulates a manageable budget shortfall as an excuse to take away state employees’ collective bargaining rights and imposing an authoritarian worldview upon Wisconsin. Collective bargaining is the established human right of workers to freely associate with others, to organize and negotiate, to sell their labor. People own their bodies, their hands, their minds and their work; and they have a RIGHT to collectively organize for their interests and for maximal benefits. It is only due to the grace of 14 fabulous state Senate Democrats having gone into exile, and hundreds of thousands of protest participants, that Wisconsin remains free for now.
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January 22, 2011
EARTH MEANDERS: Ecological Internet: Being Green and Meaning It
Caring for Earth is cool; not caring, overly consuming, greenwashing, ecological ignorance, superstition and inaction are not acceptable
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
The Earth’s life is some 3.5 billion years old. In a mere 300 years human super-predators have taken it upon themselves to cut and burn other life forms to make a more comfortable life. Most are blissfully unaware that they are destroying their habitat. Remedial actions are orders of magnitude inadequate, band-aids instead of open heart surgery. We will quickly halt this growing industrialization, commit to ecosystem protection and restoration, and return to the forest garden, or we will all die. Really, if we continue as we are, the biosphere and ecosystems collapse taking being with it. And it will be grisly.
I haven’t written a really good rip-snorting Earth Meanders in awhile; though this is largely what I am known for doing. I use to meander quite frequently, writing personal essays in the tradition of Montesquieu looking at ecological sustainability in relation to other social issues, showing it is all related with ecology as the unifier. Nor have I literally ruminated regarding my life and ecology like I use to, spilling my guts regarding my turmoil and depression resulting from an acute ecological and historical awareness of global ecological change. This is overdue; particularly as I recently turned 45, I am celebrating this month 20 years of using IT and the Internet for ecological conservation, and thus some personal reflection is due. Stop reading if you don’t want to be shocked by these personal meanderings…
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July 29, 2010
EARTH MEANDERS: The Rights of Earth
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
...and All Gaia’s Creatures to Ecological Self-Defense
Gaia – the Earth System [search] – is alive and like any living entity has rights. Earth has a right to not be stripped of its vegetative skin, its flesh mined, body punctured by wells, ecosystems liquidated; and precious water, air and oceans tainted. Gaia has the right to peacefully exist and to be free of harm, violence or ecocide (to be murdered). Air, water, land and ocean ecosystems are Gaia’s self-regulating internal ecosystem organs. All Gaia’s creatures possess an equal claim upon a fair share of her bounty for continued existence. Yet Gaia has a right to prohibit at any time, using any means, any one species from over-running the biosphere and habitats shared by all.
Sadly the industrial, speculative and unsustainable capitalistic economy benefiting some humans is killing Earth. This growth machine in population, economy and inequitable consumption has established as the norm an immoral, short-sighted way of life based upon eating ecosystems and children (or at least their future) to wantonly consume and grow a bit more. If cumulative impacts of human ecosystem destruction upon Gaia continue; the Earth System dies, taking humanity, all life and creation with her. The current paradigm’s emphasis upon growth at all costs is so pernicious that almost certainly only revolution, fundamental social change and personal transformation can eradicate it.
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May 29, 2010
EARTH MEANDERS: United States of Ecocide: Spilling and Consuming Way to Oblivion
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
A great, free nation remains immobilized in the face of ecological collapse
The United States of America is an epic experiment, as despite great accomplishments and numerous imperfections, we share a long history of constantly striving to improve our union. As Americans settle in for Memorial Day to remember veterans of all stripes – from great wars of world defense to more recent military adventurism – it is appropriate to consider what the current Gulf Oil Spill says about the American way of life. Plainly, our addiction to oil and consumption in general threatens to destroy regional and global ecosystems – the water, air, land and oceans –upon which Americans, humanity and all species depend upon for habitat and life.
America is truly exceptional. Yet it is not because of our materially excessive lifestyles, as best demonstrated by our wide girths and ample posteriors. There is more to America than consumption. Our greatness is primarily due to our wavering, imperfect yet unique commitment to freedom and liberty. Over two hundred years ago a just revolution was fought asserting individual liberties from monarchial authoritarianism. The principles of freedom and liberty were a gift to the world. This is what truly has set us apart. And despite two decades of consistent roll-backs in civil and human rights, Americans remain for now free peoples to prosper or expire.
America has and continues to face many challenges – repudiating slavery, enfranchising most, world wars – and most recently the inevitable slowdown of economic growth as speculative, industrial capitalism runs its course. America has enjoyed for awhile super-sized living and grown to be what it is based upon liquidating ecosystems. We have progressed to the point where regional ecosystems are collapsing – most obviously in the Gulf Coast, but throughout the vast country as ecosystems are dying. America now faces our most difficult and profound test ever, coming to terms with our deeply ecologically unsustainable lifestyles, and committing to national and global ecological sustainability.
February 21, 2010
EARTH MEANDERS: The Rainforest Movement Is Dead… Long Live the Old Forest Revolution
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
Old forests including tropical rainforests [search] are the ultimate expression of life, evolution and ecology. Here untold co-evolved species and genetic diversity exist and interact with each other and their environment to provide ecosystem services – water, nutrient and energy cycling – required for a habitable Earth. All intact terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems are important, yet rainforests are disproportionately so, given their tremendous species numbers and carbon stores. Few rainforest activists fully understand their ecological importance to continued being, or they would work only for full old forest protection and restoration.
When primary rainforests are lost, it is inevitable that local ecological and social conditions deteriorate, regional weather and species distributions deviate, and the global biosphere and its ability to maintain conditions for life are weakened. Rarely if ever do viable ecosystems remain to provide the same amount of ecological and development benefits as the intact standing old forests that were destroyed for the profit of the national and global elite. Virtually no one benefits from rainforest logging other than small numbers of loggers and “green logging apologists” who falsely say it can be done well.