Preserving our oceans and rivers should not be a partisan issue. Protecting the land which sustains us should not be a partisan issue. Protecting the air we breathe should not be a partisan issue...this planet is our home. https://t.co/CzfldkxjZT— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 29, 2019
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Preserving our home should not be a partisan issue
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Do something
“Doing nothing is exactly what the climate deniers, the Koch network, the N.R.A., the fossil fuel industry and every self-important yahoo in every gerrymandered district in this country wants us to do.” @MargaretRenkl https://t.co/vNO7SxtGLZ— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 14, 2019
Monday, October 14, 2019
We really can't afford this
 | The New Yorker (@NewYorker) |
|
At the moment, the planet is on track to warm more than three degrees Celsius by century's end, which one recent study found would do $551 trillion in damage—more money than currently exists on the planet.
nyer.cm/8owhDyf | |
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Naomi Klein on BookTV
The clearest, sharpest, smartest voice on the climate crisis and how it “changes everything” https://t.co/uKhla5I52F— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 6, 2019
https://www.c-span.org/video/?463950-1/depth-naomi-klein
Friday, October 4, 2019
For Rachel Carson, wonder was a radical state of mind
In 1957, the world watched in wonder as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into outer space. Despite Cold War anxieties, The New York Timesadmitted that space exploration ‘represented a step toward escape from man’s imprisonment to Earth and its thin envelope of atmosphere’. Technology, it seemed, possessed the astonishing potential to liberate humanity from terrestrial life.
But not all assessments of Sputnik were so celebratory. In The Human Condition (1958), the political theorist Hannah Arendt reflected on the Times’s strange statement, writing that ‘nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison for men’s bodies’. Such rhetoric betrayed an acute sense of alienation. Misplaced wonder at our own scientific and technological prowess, she worried, would isolate humanity from the realities of the world we share, not just with one another, but with all living creatures.
Arendt’s disquiet stemmed from the postwar context in which she lived: the United States economy was booming, and, for many Americans, the much-celebrated cycle of expansion and construction, of extraction and consumption, appeared infinite. Millions of Americans had bought into the glittering promise of limitless prosperity. While technologies such as plastic wrap and Velcro, microwave ovens and nonstick cookware might seem mundane today, they were unimaginably novel at the time, and pushed people further into a manmade world. While Arendt was concerned that humans would become self-absorbed and isolated, stupefied by the synthetic, and prone to totalitarian tricksters, others fretted that nature (for a large portion of the population, at least) was no longer a place to discover transcendence but had instead become merely a resource to be exploited. At mid-century, we were in the process of trading Walden Pond for Walmart... (continues)
But not all assessments of Sputnik were so celebratory. In The Human Condition (1958), the political theorist Hannah Arendt reflected on the Times’s strange statement, writing that ‘nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison for men’s bodies’. Such rhetoric betrayed an acute sense of alienation. Misplaced wonder at our own scientific and technological prowess, she worried, would isolate humanity from the realities of the world we share, not just with one another, but with all living creatures.
Arendt’s disquiet stemmed from the postwar context in which she lived: the United States economy was booming, and, for many Americans, the much-celebrated cycle of expansion and construction, of extraction and consumption, appeared infinite. Millions of Americans had bought into the glittering promise of limitless prosperity. While technologies such as plastic wrap and Velcro, microwave ovens and nonstick cookware might seem mundane today, they were unimaginably novel at the time, and pushed people further into a manmade world. While Arendt was concerned that humans would become self-absorbed and isolated, stupefied by the synthetic, and prone to totalitarian tricksters, others fretted that nature (for a large portion of the population, at least) was no longer a place to discover transcendence but had instead become merely a resource to be exploited. At mid-century, we were in the process of trading Walden Pond for Walmart... (continues)
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