HAVING and enforcing a County TREE ORDINANCE IS NOT a RADICAL idea. DESTROYING ANIMAL HABITATS, ECOSYSTEMS, impacting the climate, and harming our OUR TOURIST INDUSTRY, IS...
"Business as Usual is not a viable option..."
http://news.yahoo.com/un-2013-extreme-events-due-warming-earth-122616476.html
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Synopsis of the book, The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert.
"Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human."
Elizabeth Kolbert interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Elizabeth Kolbert interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered
Elizabeth Kolbert talks to Sasha Weiss about the species extinction that is apparently caused by humanity on the New Yorker's Out Loud podcast.
Prologue
Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing does—but it has the capacity to name things.
As with any young species, this one’s position is precarious. Its numbers are small, and its range restricted to a slice of eastern Africa. Slowly its population grows, but quite possibly then it contracts again—some would claim nearly fatally—to just a few thousand pairs.
The members of the species are not particularly swift or strong or fertile. They are, however, singularly resourceful. Gradually they push into regions with different climates, different predators, and different prey. None of the usual constraints of habitat or geography seem to check them. They cross rivers, plateaus, mountain ranges. In coastal regions, they gather shellfish; farther inland, they hunt mammals. Everywhere they settle, they adapt and innovate. On reaching Europe, they encounter creatures very much like themselves, but stockier and probably brawnier, who have been living on the continent far longer. They interbreed with these creatures and then, by one means or another, kill them off.
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“Powerful... Kolbert expertly traces the ‘twisting’ intellectual history of how we’ve come to understand the concept of extinction, and more recently, how we’ve come to recognize our role in it... An invaluable contribution to our understanding of present circumstances.”
—Al Gore, The New York Times Book Review
“Arresting... Ms. Kolbert shows in these pages that she can write with elegiac poetry about the vanishing creatures of this planet, but the real power of her book resides in the hard science and historical context she delivers here, documenting the mounting losses that human beings are leaving in their wake.”
—The New York Times
“Ms. Kolbert’s lively account is thought-provoking.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“What's exceptional about Kolbert's writing is the combination of scientific rigor and wry humor that keeps you turning the pages.”
—National Geographic
“With her usual lucid and lovely prose, Elizabeth Kolbert lays out the sad and gripping facts of our moment on earth: that we’ve become a geological force, driving vast swaths of creation over the brink. A remarkable addition to the literature of our haunted epoch.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
“Rendered with rare, resolute, and resounding clarity, Kolbert’s compelling and enlightening report forthrightly addresses the most significant topic of our lives.”
—Booklist, (starred review)
“[Kolbert] grounds her stories in rigorous science and memorable characters past and present, building a case that a mass extinction is underway, whether we want to admit it or not.”
—Discover Magazine
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Having the right to cut down any tree in the name of progress or profit is not freedom--it hastens our demise as a species. It is not freedom, and it is not right.--site.
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Nature's New Economy:
The economic and legal system rewards corporations that bulldoze, stripmine and burn. A new law against ecocide could halt this destruction
Charles Eisenstein
Thursday 16 January 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/vivienne-westwood-law-ecocide-european
Designer Vivienne Westwood expressed anguish and alarm at the worsening state of the planet, at a press conference yesterday. "The acceleration of death and destruction is unimaginable," she said, "and it's happening quicker and quicker."
Speaking in support of the European Citizens' Initiative to End Ecocide, her words echo a growing sentiment that we have to do something. One thing we can do is to enshrine the sanctity of the biosphere in law.
That ecocide – the destruction of ecosystems – is even a concept bespeaks a momentous change in industrial civilisation's relationship to the planet. To kill something, like Earth, presupposes that it is even alive in the first place. Today we are beginning to see the planet and all its subsystems as beings deserving of life, and no longer mere resource piles and waste dumps. As the realisation grows that we are part of an interdependent, living planet, concepts such as "rights of nature" and "law of ecocide" will become common sense.
Unfortunately, we live in an economic and legal system that contradicts that realisation. With legal impunity and at great profit, corporations bulldoze and cut, frack and drill, stripmine and burn, wreaking ecocide at every turn. It is tempting to blame corporate greed for these horrors, but what do we expect in a legal and economic system that condones and rewards them? Besides, all of us (in industrial society at least) are complicit. That's why we need a law of ecocide: a concrete emblem of the growing consensus that this must stop.
In moral terms the matter is clear, but what about economic terms? Is ending ecocide practical? Is it affordable? The economic objection implies, "Yes, we should stop killing the planet – but not now. We have to wait till the economy improves and we can afford it." Is this to say that we must accelerate our headlong depletion of natural capital in order that, in some mythical future, we will be rich enough to restore it? Does anyone really believe that we should preserve a living planet only if it doesn't disrupt business-as-usual?
The unvarnished truth that environmentalists might not like to admit is that a law of ecocide would hurt the economy as we know it, which depends on an ever-growing volume of goods and services, increased consumption so demand can keep pace with rising productivity at full employment. Today, that requires stripping more and more minerals, timber, fish, oil, gas, and so on from the Earth, with the inevitable loss of habitats, species, and ultimately the health and viability of the entire biosphere.
Changing that is no trivial matter. What about the estimated 500,000 jobs to be created by the ecologically devastating Albertan tar sands exploitation? We need to change our economic system so that employment needn't depend on participating in the conversion of nature into product. We will have to pay people to do things that do not generate goods and services as we know them today – to replant forests, for example, instead of clearcutting them; to restore wetlands instead of developing them. Every facet of modern life contributes to ecocide; we should expect, then, that every aspect of life will change in the post-ecocidal era.
It is more accurate to say that, instead of hurting the economy, a law of ecocide would transform the economy. It is part of a transition to an economy with less throwaway stuff, and more things made with great care, more bikes and fewer cars, more gardens and fewer supermarkets, more leisure and less production, more recycling and fewer landfills, more sharing and less owning.
What about the argument that if Europe criminalised ecocide, it would be put at a competitive disadvantage with countries that allow it? It is often the case that the rapid stripping of natural capital brings high short-term profits.
How can sustainably harvested lumber from one place compete with cheap, clearcut lumber from another? It can't – unless the principle of ending ecocide is also written into international trade agreements and tariff policies. Sadly, international trade agreements under negotiation today, such as the Transpacific Trade Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TPIP), threaten to do the opposite: corporations could have ecocide laws invalidated as barriers to trade.
We need to reverse that trend. A European anti-ecocide law would establish a new moral and legal basis for a global consensus to end ecocide and preserve the planet for future generations. Even if the law isn't enacted immediately, the initiative puts the idea on the radar screen. Sooner or later, such a law is coming, and far-sighted businesses that anticipate the changes it will bring will thrive in the long run, even if that requires difficult short-term transitions.
The European ecocide initiative has so far been signed by about 100,000 people – far short of the one million threshold required to compel the European Commission to consider it formally. Will future generations look back from a ruined planet and wonder why only 0.02% of Europeans exercised their democratic rights to stop ecocide? We can do better than that.
Charles Eisenstein is a speaker and writer focusing on themes of civilisation and human cultural evolution.
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According to the book of Genesis God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise with the instructions to cultivate it and to take care of it.
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NASA STUDY SHOW CIVILIZATION WILL END due to its practices
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Revelation 11:18, New World Translation:
"...and it came time for the dead to be judged....and to bring to ruin those ruining the Earth."