- The mounting distortions of climate change and the rapid depletion of natural resources have done little to blunt the self-destructive notion of ceaseless expansion. The road we are on points toward human extinction. Chris Hedges on Climate Change
- Ending the Silence on Climate Change
- New Year's Resolutions: Speak Out To Save Democracy, Humanity & Biosphere
Chris Hedges, Truthdig
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Illustration by Mr. Fish
January 13, 2013 | Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee <http://www.globalchange.gov/what-we-do/assessment/draft-report-informati... illustrates.
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Related:
Ending the Silence on Climate Change, Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company
- Scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, joins Bill to describe his efforts to do what even Hurricane Sandy couldn’t – galvanize communities over what’s arguably the greatest single threat facing humanity.
- New Year's Resolutions: Speak Out To Save Democracy, Humanity & Biosphere
- Hillary’s Environmental Failure
New Year's Resolutions: Speak Out To Save Democracy, Humanity & Biosphere, Gideon Polya, Greedy One Percenter Corporatocracy / Counter Currents
Ordinary Ninetynine Percenters can and must act before it is too late by (a) informing everyone they can and (b) by urging and applying direct, democratic pressure as voters and consumers. Our key New Year's Resolution must be to do our bit to save Humanity and the Biosphere and to help restore Democracy to our Western Murdochracies , Lobbyocracies and Corporatocracies before it is too late.
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January 11, 2013 | Global warming is already changing America from sea to rising sea and is affecting how Americans live, a massive new federally commissioned report says.
Photo: Campus Progress