#theendofnature

[sustainablevenice-blog]

Part-time #VeniceBeach resident Jed Wolf contributed to @planetexperts online article on the talk given by #BillMcKibben of @350org at @pepperdine! Check it out... planetexperts.com/bill-mckibben-by-itself-cop21-means-nothing-the-movement-makes-it-real/ #sustainability #theendofnature #350org #ClimateChange

[e-rot]

One summer day, while I was walking along the country rode on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility around me, the effect was quite startling . . . It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.

John Burroughs, quoted in Bill McKibben The End of Nature

[schemeranddreamer-blog]

What if they gave us a practical--as opposed to moral or an aesthetic--reason to climb out of our rut and find a new one that leads in some different direction? A reason based on atmospheric chemistry, not Eastern spirituality. That is why Stolz's phrase caught my ear, his notion that we might be no more important than anything else. If a new idea--a humble idea, in contrast to the conventional defiant attitude--is going to rise out of the wreckage we have made of the world, this is the gut feeling, the impluse, it will come from. The idea that the rest of creation might count for as much as we do is spectacularly foreign, even to most environmentalists. The ecological movement has always had its greatest success in convincing people that we are threatened by some looming problem--or, if we are not threatened directly, then some creature we find appealing, such as the seal or the whale or the songbird. The tropical rain forests must be saved because they contain millions of species that may have medical uses--that was the single most common argument against tropical deforestation until it was replaced by the greenhouse effect. Even the American wilderness movement, in some ways a radical crusade, has argued for wilderness largely as places for man--places big enough for backpackers to lose themselves in and for stressed city dwellers to find themselves. But what if we began to believe in the rain forest FOR ITS OWN SAKE? This attitude has very slowly begun to spread in recent years, both in America and abroad, as the effects of man's domination have become clearer. Some few people have begun to talk of two views of the world--the traditional, man-cenetered-anthropocentric view and the biocentric vision of people as a part of the world, just like bears. Many of those who take the biocentric view are, of course, oddballs....And theirs is admittedly a radical idea, almost an unrealistic idea. It strikes at the root of our identities. But we live at a radical, unrealistic moment. We live at the end of nature, the moment when the essential character of the world we've known since we stopped swinging from our tails is suddenly changing. I'm not intrinsically attracted to radical ideas anymore. I have a house, and a bank account, and I'd like my life, all other things being equal, to continue in its current course. But all other things are not equal--we live at an odd moment in human history when the most basic elements of our lives are changing. I love the trees outside my window; they are a part of my life. I don't want to see them shrivel in the heat, nor sprout in perfect cloned rows. The damage we have done to the planet, and the damage we seem set to do in a genetically engineered business-as-usual-future, make me wonder if there isn't some other way. If there isn't a humbler alternative--one that would let us hew closer to what remains of nature, and give it room to recover, if it can. An alternative that would involve changing not only the way we act but also the way we think.

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, one of the most impressive books I've read on the end of nature as a result of global warming and the greenhouse effect. And he wrote it almost 20 years ago...Think how much has changed since then? It's only gotten worse.