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Earth Day 2015
Hovek Olam - Embrace the World
Good day, fellow surface dwellers, Sisters and Brothers under the Sun, and all other family members tuned in. Hope this finds you well on your side of The Screen, today.
Speaking of today, April 23, the day after Earth Day:
Earth days fill my calendar the whole year through, yet as we chose this day to shift and sharpen our focus on the health of our world, our planet, our home, I will dime a drop in the bucket. Sit back and grow some of your own popcorn, because this may take quite a little while or even a little longer, esp:ecially if and when one follows all blu-lit links to extrasitual resources of information, after having processed the following - a few points of view I strongly resonate with:
watch this playlist on youtube
"Climate change denial is like denying gravity."
- U.S. vice-president Biden.
Indeed, dear Joe. Not sure if this quote captures your exact words, but yes, indeed: denying the existence of our changing climate seems like sticking your head in the sand, whilst ignoring a question like "where did all this sand actually come from?" As a matter of fact, the history of climate change goes back as far as the history of Life on Earth does. Equally so: trying to stop climate change is like trying to stop gravity. Please allow me to elaborate, as I understand this may come across as a rather bold statement.
In these my words, both gravity and climate change portray natural forces, elements of Nature, essential characteristics of the ever-changing Earth, the living planet that spawned us - little, young us - amongst a multitude of living creatures we apparently prefer to see (and judge) as if they exist separate from us; as if we do not belong to our environment and the deeply rooted global Tree of Life that bears all the earthly fruit; as if we seem to exist apart from Nature, instead of existing as a part of Nature.
But let's leave the other branches at ease in the breeze and keep our own point of view for the moment. When we shift our focus to the geological time scale, we notice how we live in an everchanging climate, how certain cataclysmic events of the past went hand in hand with peaks and troughs throughout aeons in the past up until today. It seems fairly simple to see, when considering how most creatures that ever lived became extinct, that we have to learn from the climate's behavior, its effects on all Life and vice versa, if and when we care enough to survive. Reading my writing, here and now, should give you a bit of an idea of how much I think to care.
It seems most likely, most natural and most logical to me, that in order to survive, we have to fully adapt to all changes, connecting those we realize inside with those we witness around us; to truly adopt the principle of give-and-take by following the way of least resistance; to live in harmony with all Life on Earth, as a self-aware unit of the living planet. If and when we choose to resist change, ignore change or force change to stop, change itself will break us, as easily as it has made us.
This idea of harmonious adaptation emerges for instance from Aikido - not the practice of this martial art but the philosophy it adheres to. To keep it short & simple for now: Ai means harmonize or unify; Ki means life force, life energy or spirit; Do means path or way, making Aikido "the way of unifying (with) life energy" or "the path to harmonize (with) the force of life", as we may interpret it in a variety of English translations. Basically, it comes down to this: if you resist the attack of an opponent, or react with similar force, you will harm or break the opponent or the opponent will harm or break you. Instead, Aikido teaches to harmonize with an opponent (rather like dance partners do) by adapting to the attack and reacting to it with the least possible force, assuring never to hurt, damage or break an opponent (compare for instance the first three examples with the last one in this drawing and elaborated in this text).
Applying this path to harmony to ourselves and the world around us: if we try to stop climate change, we might hurt, damage or break the climate - all options heading for the worse or worst. We could enforce our will to stop it from changing by holding a rigid stance, but do we really want to live on either Snowball Earth or Greenhouse Earth? The solution in principle, the best option in store, seems quite simple: we have to find the middle way by adapting and reacting to change lest we ourselves might fall victim to the change we oppose.
My point in all this: we can neither stop climate change completely nor should we try. We can however learn to adapt to our changing environment, change our own behavior, get rid of wasteful consumption, and understand how we cannot escape the Circle of Life on Earth and its motto: recycle or become recycled. And in this, our case: recycling does not end with simply separating our garbage, printing on politically correct paper, driving or riding electric vehicles or vote for political parties that bear the word green. Conscientious choices perhaps, yet mere tips of quite a number of free-floating icebergs.
Before slapping a tag on me or my words, let me share a little bit about myself.
In the Nineties I studied Biology at the UvA (University of Amsterdam) before the campus changed into the business-oriented Science Park of the present. Straight off the top: I do not feel like a biologist, neither did I care to follow the tedious rat-race-path, climbing the stairs to reach the top of Mount Kar'eer. However, I do practice a strong analytical way of thinking, rather scientific as considered by others, always trying to find a balance between hemispheres, never growing one inch tired of feeding my unbridled, innate curiosity.
During my studies I (quite succesfully) followed courses like neurochemistry, neurobiology, biochemistry, microbiology, plant & animal physiology, food & nutrition, philosophy of science, botany, paleo/actuo-ecology and geology. During the latter course, one of the professors taught how we can read the geological record like a history book of the Earth's climate and understand what changes may have occurred in the past. This geological history book shows clearly, that during Ice Ages, colder (glacial) periods and warmer (interglacial) periods followed one another, roughly over the past two billion years. Right now, we live in an interglacial. Detailed analysis of the rock under our feet shows how every interglacial ends with a short period of enhanced greenhouse effect before the climate changes to reach a glacial state again. Furthermore, I learned that the global warming we witness in our common present most likely represents the end of the current interglacial, a preparation for the next glacial period, a completely natural process at work, a process developing with or without our influence. This means that anthropogenic climate change may quite unwittingly lend a helping hand to the natural advent of extremely colder times ahead. A rather crucial conclusion, whatever next stage the change may encompass.
Our instruments to measure any kind of climate change have become much more sophisticated during our recent past since the start of meteorological research, roughly two centuries ago, less than a mere blink of an eye on geological scales. The data becomes much more intricate when it comes to studying climate changes of the recent past in detail, and growing ever more minutely detailed up to and including yesterday. The farther back in time we look, the less detailed the data becomes, ergo vice versa: we can measure more detailed changes over shorter periods, i.e. sharper extremes in deceleration and acceleration of average temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of (greenhouse) gases, the closer our study of the climate reaches up to but not incuding today. The study of today follows tomorrow.
As for the results of our studying cause & effect of climate change, these have become way more diverse and making it ever more clear that, for instance: 1) the solar cycle has a great and steady effect on the terrestrial climate and fluctuation thereof, 2) the human influence on our habitat as a whole (Earth, environment, et cetera) has accelerated enormously during recent times, with a growing variety of devastating consequences, and 3) the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations seems to follow the rise of global temperature closely, instead of causing it to rise, whereas both seem to follow the rise and fall of atmospheric dust particle concentration, and quite slowly so.
Here and now, that seems about as far as I can sum up my knowledge of geology and such, by heart or from memory, when it comes to details about fluctuations and cycles we witness in the climate of the past and in the present. My opinion, my thoughts on where to go from here and now, sum up as follows: instead of trying to stop climate change we need to drastically change the way we affect our environment, with rampant deforestation, squanderful consumerism and avaricious industrialization as a mere three examples of our myriad of destructive ways. We cannot wait any longer for good examples to flow "down from the top", if one cares to believe in the existence of such a vertical hierarchy in society. And more than flowing "up from the bottom", changes in our behavior, our attitude, our self-awareness should come equilaterally from every corner of society, now or never more (thanks, Ed).
For instance, if and when we want to get rid of the excess CO2 we produce, we need to plant more & cut less trees, maintain rainforests and coral reefs, apart from getting rid of our consumption of fossil fuels and the water-wasting production thereof, for a start. We have to learn from our vegetal family members how to optimize our utilization of Sunlight, how to effectively recycle waste products of energy consumption and adopt methods to produce less excess CO2 on the way.
Plants utilize sunlight to power a process we call photosynthesis. Plants combine H2O from the soil with CO2 from the atmosphere to create carbohydrates for instance, excreting O2 as a "waste"- / byproduct of this process. We use exactly that O2 to breathe and survive, exhaling CO2 which in turn the plants recycle (again) into their own food (which we and other animals eat, bythewave) and again into O2. As Carl Sagan notes: "We need the plants much more than they need us." Obviously a very agreeable point of view, which introduces us to the idea that a stronger, more synergetic symbiosis may work out even more positive for both sides of this story.
The vital importance of this complete recycling process cannot seem more simple and easy to comprehend. It implies we should not simply separate our garbage, but make full use of what we tend to throw away by making new stuff and growing new food, return an amount of biomass to the natural cycle equal to that which we took from it, so all of Nature, us and all other lifeforms together, will benefit from the fruits that the Tree of Life on Earth bears. If we want to prevent our branch to break off and become a nice piece of kindle for future species, we have to break free from the current downward spiral, start making the circle complete and bend it outward into an upward spiral, right here and now.
As we move into the future, one step at a time, it seems most logical that we learn to govern our means of survival collectively, with humanity as one and with Earth, the living planet, as a whole. But do not take my word for it. Read what one of the smartest and wisest people of last century thought about this:
“I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics. I set about to see what a penniless, unknown human individual with a dependent wife and newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity.” - Buckminster Fuller
Leaving Bucky's achievements for another time and place, I would like to use two of his neologies: we have to let go of killingry and focus on livingry. Leaving the problems of society to politicians, who prefer to spend the larger part of our global budget on perpetuating warfare and its profitable machinery, will merely cause more taxes, increase spending on the organization of conferences on climate change with humongous carbon footprints, producing more waste and less solutions, leading to less and less equivalence in society.
Live Earth (2007) comes to mind as a striking example. Musicians, comedians and other artists strutted on stage whilst yelling oneliners like "we gotta do something for the environment" after being flown in from all over the world on airliners, that use what to keep their engines running? Solar power? Biofuel? Faith? And transport from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the stadium, by foot or bicycle instead of limosine? Right. A grrreat way to make people aware of something like the aforementioned carbon footprint. Maybe the message did come across as it went around the globe, but still: hypocrisy, the greatest luxury. A better option seems to start implementing the change we want to see in the World by ourselves and start now - start now and don't stop until we reach a new level of synergetic balance. In the meantime we cannot stop sharing our new ways with all others around us, and indeed, make politicians aware of the fact that we have had enough with the repetition of the old ways under new guises.
As for summits, seminars and other gatherings, as Bruno Manser once put it: "If we leave the protection of the last virgin forests to the monkeys it would be much more efficient than to leave it to all these big conferences on the protection of forests." - click here for the clip.
An equally bright vision comes from another loving person, equally smart as wise, Carl Sagan yet again, in the shape of another quote from the original Cosmos series, Episode 4, Heaven and Hell:
"Computer models that successfully explain the climates of other planets, predict the deaths of forests, parched croplands, the flooding of coastal cities, environmental refugees, widespread disasters in the (twenty-first) century unless we change our ways. What do we have to do? Four things:
1. Much more efficient use of fossil fuels.*
2. Research and development on safe alternative energy sources, especially solar power.
3. Reforestation on a grand scale.
4. Helping to bring the billion poorest people on the planet to self-sufficiency, which is the key step in curbing world population growth." - click here for the clip.
* Of course, doing without fossil fuels altogether may seem like an unsurmountable task, but only to those who fear to exchange the familiar with the unknown-as-yet, and in the end it would not mark the End of the World. Yes. Not to worry. The End of the World may not seem as nigh as many a panicker may think these days.
However, The End for humanity, the curtain for human life as we know it, may lay around the bend, moving into view closer and closer. The change, again, must come from within. Wishing, praying or asking for it will not work. On the contrary: if we do not choose to change, the change will become us. We will become recycled by Earth, the living planet we call our home. This has happened to countless other species before us, during a process that paved the way for the rise, development and survival of our own species. Without all the death and destruction that happened before the dawn of our day, we may never have made it this far, we may even never have come to exist. Perhaps.
We may give ourselves and other lifeforms a hard time, a really hard time, but Mother Earth shall survive. She has stood through far worse tests than she does right now by trying to raise humanity. Again, not to worry, time does seem to reside on her side. As for us, well ... just stop and think for a moment, and remember: every end welcomes a new beginning.
Recycle or become recycled.
Change or become change.
My O2 Cents
.: don't panic - adapt - react - change :.
all text, apart from the used quotes:
ⓦ Satyr Barbarossa (cc) 2015, April 23
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