Environment and Climate Change

Actions ( 1)

Melting Ice ( 5)

Sea Level ( 1)

The ocean ( 3)

Richard Heinberg – Peak Everything

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

Richard Heinberg has influenced the work of those who are searching for a way out of today’s interlocking crisis of climate, finance and resource depletion. I visited him in Sept. 2010 at a crucial moment. He had just written the new preface for his 2007 book Peak Everything, Waking Up to the Century of Declines. Analyzing the events of the past three years Heinberg writes in his update that the question of when we will reach the peak of the resources that we made ourselves dependent on has finally been answered – and the time is NOW. The economic crisis, he says, is not a dip from which we will recover. Humanity has achieved an unsustainable pinnacle of population size [ . . . ]

Julia Whitty – on the impact of the BP oil spill

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

For Love and Protection of the Deep Ocean – on the impact of the BP oil spill
Julia Whitty is a diver, former nature documentary filmmaker, author and investigative journalist. As environmental correspondent for Mother Jones she had just returned from the Gulf Coast. She wrote: “BP and its partners reckless quest has endangered and perhaps condemned not just the Gulf Coast, but the largest, richest, most pristine, most biologically important, and last completely unprotected ecosystem left on Earth: the deep ocean.”
Julia Whitty explains why the deep ocean is the foundation of life for the upper layer of the sunlit sea. Many whales, dolphins, seals, sea turtles, sharks, manta rays, and smaller predatory fish are nocturnal hunters, dependent on the movements [ . . . ]

Gasland – Resistance To Drilling In The Marcellus Shale

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

Six weeks into the BP oil disaster President Obama said we need to move to natural gas as a clean fuel alternative. Material from the trailer to the movie GASLAND and voices from DamascusCitizens.org call that into question. They say that chemicals used in the process of hydraulic fracturing and set free in drilling have poisoned water and air. A grassroots movement is resisting the encroachment of gas drilling into Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
They encounter two problems: The fossil fuel industry was exempted from the clean air and safe drinking water act under the Bush administration, and corporations do not need to disclose what chemicals they use. Test results from drinking water in people’s homes and from spills and [ . . . ]

Silvia Ribeiro – Geoengineering The Planet

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

Addressing the effects, not the causes, of climate change
Geo-engineers are proposing large scale global projects to reduce solar radiation. They want to force the oceans into absorbing more CO2 through “fertilization”, and they work on carbon sequestration and weather modification.
While most climate scientist left the Copenhagen Summit feeling gloomy about the lack of action to halt climate change, a small group felt emboldened. They are the geo-engineers who are proposing large scale global projects to reduce solar radiation by spreading sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere, placing sunshades into space or by whitening the clouds. They also want to force the oceans into absorbing more of the excess CO2 through “fertilization” by spreading urea, iron or phosphorous. And they work on [ . . . ]

Dr. Lonnie Thompson – Melting Of The High Mountain Glaciers Of The World

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future
Dr. Thompson issues a warning that the mountain glaciers he knows and loves are melting ever more dramatically just within the year of 2007. He is the leading expert on glaciers with 30 years of on location research.
Dr. Lonnie Thompson saw one of the first ice cores that was recovered from a glacier when he was in graduate school. He was fascinated by the amount of data on earth history, past climate and world changing events that can be read from these ice cores and made the exploration of ice his life’s work. He now teaches in the Department of Geological Sciences and is Senior Research Scientists at the Byrd Polar Center at Ohio State University.
In [ . . . ]

Witness To The Melting Of The Greenland Ice

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

UPDATED.
An Inuit elder speaks
Recorded in a tent during a rainstorm
by Cien Fuegos in July, 2007
in the Valley of the Ancients on Greenland.
When I first heard his voice in 2007 I wished I could move radio stations to play this recording every day to show that voices like his can reach us and inspire us to recognize our common future. But even though there is enough water bound up in the melting Greenland ice sheet to raise sea level by 21 feet and drown the cities of London and New York this program had very limited distribution. That’s why I decided to play his appeal again – two years later as the Inuit of the circumpolar regions appeal to the United [ . . . ]

Derrick Jensen: Bringing Down Civilization

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

Derrick Jensen wrote in his early book: “Listening to the Land”: “We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide –all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity.” And he follows that with a question: “Why do we act as we do? What are sane and effective responses to outrageously destructive behavior? What will it take for us to stop the horrors that characterize our way of being? My work and life revolve around these questions. “
When I recorded him in the Oakland, California warehouse of AK Press, Derrick Jensen asked that [ . . . ]

Arjun Makhjijani And David Freeman – Is Nuclear Power Coming Back?

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Creative Communities, Environment and Climate Change

– and do we need a police state to live with it?
Pres. Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, says he will streamline loan guarantees to build nuclear and coal fired power plants. This puts nuclear power on the watch list for the Obama administration.
This program features one of the great orators and elders of the anti nuclear movement. David Freeman shut down 8 of their 14 reactors while heading the Tennessee Valley Authority under Pres. Carter. He calls nuclear a failed technology and says that, in the age of terrorism, we need a police state to guard those Trojan horses.
Preceding Freeman’s comment you will hear from Dr. Arjun Makhijani. He holds a degree in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, [ . . . ]

Bill Mckibben On Deep Economy

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

A talk and conversation with Michael Pollan
Bill McKibben’s book: ‘The End of Nature’ is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change. Published in 1989, it has been printed in more than 20 languages. He has since written on localization, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. In his most recent book: ‘Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future’ he envisions a transition to local-scale enterprise.
McKibben and his family live in Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College where he launched the campaign: stepitup2007, demanding that global warming pollution be cut 80 percent by 2050. McKibben spoke in Berkeley in March 2007. The church was filled to [ . . . ]

Restoring A Forest – With Fire And Love

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

Dennis Martinez
Church and military records show that in the early 19th century California’s forests were not “wild” but carefully tended. The catastrophic wildfires of today were extremely rare. Dennis Martinez talks about Indian forest practice and restoration. He has worked for 35 years in eco-cultural restoration specializing in tribal lands and cultural issues. Contact him at <http://www.ser.org/iprn/founder.asp>
The forest at the Mountain Grove Center For New Education, near Glendale in SW Oregon was clear-cut in the 1930s and 40s. It has come back thick, young, and dark. When Indians cared for the land the old growth incense cedars and chinquapins were spaced widely, plants thrived on the sun-lit forest floor, and animals found shelter and food. Dennis Martinez [ . . . ]

Confronting The Global Triple Crisis – False Solutions To Peak Oil And Climate Change

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

Dr. Hermann Ott, Mary Anne Hitt, Jutta Kill And Dr. Arjun Makhijani.
In September of 2007 the International Forum on Globalization held a Teach in Washington DC on climate change, peak oil and global resource depletion & extinction. <http://www.ifg.org>
Several Panel meetings addressed the many false solutions to the climate crisis that may be accelerating the danger rather than alleviating it. Coal for example is now promoted as a substitute for oil and promises for the capture of the carbon are made that are not yet possible with current technologies and may never be available on a large scale.
Dr. Hermann Ott is head of the Berlin office of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. He is the co-author [ . . . ]

Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow & Daphne Wysham: Confronting The Global Triple Crisis

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

In September of 2007 the International Forum on Globalization held a Teach in Washington DC on climate change, peak oil and global resource depletion & extinction
Vandana Shiva had just witnessed the arctic melt on Greenland and speaks eloquently about the destructive forces of globalization that are driving the ecological crisis. She also sheds light on the effects of rapid economic growth in her home country, India.
Maude Barlow has completed a new book, entitled: Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and The Coming Battle for the Right to Water. She explains how we are losing water through pollution, over-pumping and displacement while the demands for water are rising. She names the corporations that are in the process of capturing water sources [ . . . ]

Dr. James Hansen: The Threat To The Planet

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

How can we avoid dangerous human-made climate change
Dr. James Hansen is one of the few scientists who have consistently warned that the impact that humans have on the climate is bringing about changes that are faster than we ever believed and may be irreversible if action is not taken now. Hansen is Director of the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and he teaches at Columbia. Since the late 1970s, he has worked on studies of the Earth’s climate. He has run afoul of government censors since the 1980s. Repeatedly his testimony before Congress was suppressed or re-written.
Hansen says that the unprecedented and rising amounts of greenhouse gases added each year AND the speed at which we [ . . . ]

Interviews With Dr. James Hansen and Dr. Hermann Scheer

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change

Interviews With Dr. James Hansen, Nasa And Dr. Hermann Scheer,
World Council For Renewable Energy And Member Of The German Parliament
Dr. James Hansen is one of the few climate scientists who has consistently warned that the impact that humans have on the climate is bringing about changes that are faster than we ever believed and maybe irreversible if action is not taken now. Hansen is Director of the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a division of the Goddard Space Flight Center. <http://www.giss.nasa.gov/> Since the late 1970s, he has worked on studies and computer simulations of the Earth’s climate.
Hansen has run afoul of government censors since the 1980s when he was asked to testify before Congress. [ . . . ]

Monsanto Vs. Percy Schmeiser

By MariaJuly 11, 2016Environment and Climate Change, Food & WaterGMOs, Organic Farming

Report on the lawsuit that challenges the ownership of life by corporations
Percy Schmeiser and Ignacio Chapela
Monsanto, the giant multinational agro-chemical company, sued Percy Schmeiser over the presence of their patented canola that had invaded the edges of Schmeiser’s field from a neighbor’s plot. The Schmeiser case has become one of the most watched and most important cases for organic farmers, seed savers, for the movement against the invasion of the biosphere by genetically modified plants, and against corporate ownership of life.
Schmeiser was recorded in Ukiah, CA, in November 2006. He gave a report of his multi-year legal battle to save his land and home, and his 50 year legacy as plant breeder from being seized by Monsanto over 12 pounds [ . . . ]