"Anthropocene" film-trailer

TED Talks on the Anthropocene... (if you watch one, post a comment/review...)

Our Hubris Will Be Our End https://nyti.ms/2Mw7ScM

Andrew Revkin, Embracing the Anthropocene

	Long Now (@longnow)
8/13/18, 3:37 PM "We live now in a different world." Trailer for #Anthropocene, long-awaited film by past #LongNow speaker ⁦‪@EdwardBurtynsky‬⁩ & director #JenniferBaichwal completing their epic trilogy. ⁦‪@anthropocene‬⁩ debuts next month ⁦‪@TIFF_NET‬⁩ youtube.com/watch?v=44RYqg…

	The New Yorker (@NewYorker)
8/13/18, 9:06 AM How climate change contributed to this summer’s wildfires: nyer.cm/6XoWzkw pic.twitter.com/fsO6lOln9L

	Andrew Revkin (@Revkin)
8/14/18, 7:03 AM Transcript & links to come, but here's my #WITHpod chat with ⁦‪@chrislhayes‬⁩ on 30 years of reporting on the scariest facts about climate change that no one likes to focus on, on the #expandingbullseye, on our inconvenient minds... And it's fun! Really. art19.com/shows/why-is-t… pic.twitter.com/oCLMCzioZG

	Andrew Revkin (@Revkin)
8/14/18, 7:55 AM "Jim Hansen is pro nuclear, Bill McKibben is pro renewables... They found a way to tie themselves to the same fences at the White House and not argue with each other about their visions of the solution. But most of the community around this issue hasn't figured that out yet."

	Long Now (@longnow)
8/13/18, 1:25 PM Kim Stanley Robinson talks #geoengineering: "We need to choose to put science, technology, engineering and medicine to good human and biosphere work" huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-…

	Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders)
8/17/18, 10:40 AM What Trump and his friends in the fossil fuel industry are doing is criminal. pic.twitter.com/9asCd1HjPl

A disturbing video from the Weather Channel - "Exodus: Never the Same Year" (Thanks, Don):

https://weather.com/science/environment/video/exodus-never-the-same-every-year

Are we like dinosaurs, gently warming?

	Nigel Warburton (@philosophybites)
8/13/18, 2:15 AM Lessons about the nature of mass extinction. Are we like dinosaurs in a pan that is being gently warmed? ⁦‪@bbosker‬⁩ ⁦‪@TheAtlantic‬⁩ theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Ten of the best tweets on climate change...

1. YEAH, COULD WE?
 

Megan Collins

✔@megancollins

Could reporters stop asking if political leaders "believe" in climate change and start asking if they understand it instead

6:46 AM - Jun 2, 2017

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• 48.2K people are talking about this

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Here’s the reality: There is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that our climate is changing and humans are to blame. When we burn fossil fuels, we pump heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere that cause temperatures to rise. And just like the health of our families, climate change should never be a partisan issue! Get the facts in our free Climate 101 e-book.

2. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON HAS QUESTIONS READY TO ASK ALIEN LIFE
 

Neil deGrasse Tyson

✔@neiltyson

If I were ever abducted by aliens, the first thing I’d ask is whether they came from a planet where people also deny science.

9:01 PM - Mar 24, 2015

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As climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann told Climate Reality in an interview last year, “There is no longer a worthy debate to be had about whether we have a problem. There is a worthy debate to be had about how we go about solving that problem.”

3. HE’S NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO WONDERS WHAT EXTRATERRESTRIALS WOULD THINK
 

naan swanson@johnbiehl

Alien: why should I not blow up this planet?

Human: we are an advanced species

A: how do you travel?

H: we light old dinosaurs on fire

9:40 AM - Jun 12, 2015

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• 7,434 people are talking about this

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Frankenstein for our times

	Five Books (@five_books)
8/13/18, 6:30 AM "Frankenstein is really a novel for the Anthropocene—the idea that humans have fundamentally changed the environment, and that we are now having to live with the consequences." ⁦‪@Prof_Nick_Groom‬⁩ explores five unusual Gothic works fivebooks.com/best-books/the…

"A Community Cracked Open by Fracking"

Any ideology operating under the seismic pressures of the actual world will reveal a seam of inconsistency, a line of vulnerability running through it like a stress fracture. Free-market conservatives, for instance, have tried to square their support for big business with their professed fondness for little communities, sometimes by suggesting that the interests of both are one and the same.

Eliza Griswold will tell you what happens when they’re not. Scratch that: Eliza Griswold will show you what happens when they’re not. Her sensitive and judicious new book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” is neither an outraged sermon delivered from a populist soapbox nor a pinched, professorial lecture. Griswold, a journalist and a poet, paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that injects water and chemicals deep into the ground in order to shake loose deposits of natural gas.

Considering the animus and hardship described in this book, the title sounds almost cruelly ironic, but it comes from the land itself. Amity and Prosperity are the names of two towns in Pennsylvania’s Washington County, where “the history of energy extraction is etched into Appalachian hollows.” The people there are no strangers to industry, including its boons and disasters. Coal, steel and now natural gas: To suggest that the county’s residents have just been bamboozled by greedy industry sounds to them like the bleating of condescending elites and, for a number of locals, simply untrue. Some families have suffered while others have thrived. What Griswold depicts is a community, like the earth, cracked open.

Griswold arrived on the scene in 2011, a little more than halfway through the decade of the gas rush, when technological advances made fracking cheaper — economically speaking, that is. The ecological costs have proved to be quite dear. (continues)

Erle C. Ellis (one of our authors) asks: What kind of planet do we want to live on?

Science Alone Won’t Save the Earth. People Have to Do That.
By Erle C. Ellis
Dr. Ellis studies the ecology of human landscapes.
This planet is in crisis. The safe limits within which human societies can be sustained, the earth’s “planetary boundaries,” are being exceeded, a path leading inevitably toward collapse. The experts have spoken. Only if humanity heeds the science, reverses course and lives within earth’s natural limits can disaster be avoided.

Or maybe you believe the opposite: that human ingenuity can continue to overcome those limits, that there is no need for environmental concern.

Both miss the point. In the age of humans, the Anthropocene, there is no safety in natural limits. Or in overcoming them. For those reasons, we should put the idea of limits off limits.

The question is not whether two degrees of warming is riskier than 1.5 degrees (of course it is), or whether we are using, as some claim, more than one earth’s worth of resources per year (of course not), or how many extinctions per year are sustainable without a collapse of human societies (why allow any at all?). The real question is how we better negotiate among ourselves, across all our many diverse peoples and cultures, so that we can navigate together toward the better futures we wish for, in our different ways... (nyt, continues)

The whole earth, from a San Francisco rooftop

Watch the Virtual Reality Recreation of the LSD Trip That Inspired the Whole Earth Catalog

In the spring of 1966, Stewart Brand did 100 micrograms of LSD and sat on top of a roof in San Francisco.

Perched there, he looked toward a curved horizon and imagined the spherical Earth and just how limited resources on our planet are. Out of that psychedelic drug-induced vision, he developed the Whole Earth theory. He campaigned for NASA to release satellite images of the Earth, and created the influential and generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog...

See the VR recreation (with Stewart Brand's narration) here

An antidote to climate despair

If you need an antidote to climate despair, this is *exactly* what you should read. Kudos to @GeoffDembicki for writing words we all need to hear: When the habitability of the planet is on the line, there is always, always something worth fighting for.

Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)

8/3/18, 2:50 PM

This is a very smart essay from ⁦‪@NaomiAKlein‬⁩ theintercept.com/2018/08/03/cli…

	Earth Day Network (@EarthDayNetwork)
8/3/18, 3:55 PM Don't think you can do anything about climate change? Think again. Use our carbon footprint calculator to find out what kind of mark you're making -- then make steps to tread more lightly. earthday.org/take-action/fo…#ActOnClimate

Clock of the Long Now

Why did we build a clock deep in a mountain to tick for 10,000 years? This short and sweet video explains why:

"An Astrophysical Approach to Our Environmental Crisis"

NYT: Near the beginning of his engaging and accessible book “Light of the Stars,” Adam Frank strikes a familiar environmental alarm bell: “It’s like we’ve been given the keys to the planet. Now we’re ready to drive it off a cliff.” Frank’s interesting new idea is to combine a history of climate change on Earth with recent astronomical data indicating the likelihood of a vast number of habitable planets in the universe, to suggest that we can strengthen our resolve to kick our bad environmental habits by viewing our terrestrial civilization from a cosmic perspective. For example, he cites evidence that Mars once had liquid water and a thick atmosphere — friendly conditions for life. Apparently, climates can drastically

An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and a founder of the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, Frank argues that we earthlings should adopt a new narrative of our history and future. Rather than just continuing to procreate and exploit our capacities and resources on Earth, we should recognize that we and our planet are evolving together. Our planet might be viewed as a single living organism, coined Gaia by the scientist and futurist James Lovelock. We have entered a new geological age, what biologists call the Anthropocene, in which we, Homo sapiens, are altering the planet, and our survival depends on understanding this symbiosis. Frank asks: Have other civilizations elsewhere in the universe, evolving through their corresponding Anthropocenes, managed to survive? And by what strategy? Of course, we don’t know the answer to these questions, as we have not yet seen evidence of such civilizations beyond our own planet, and we may well not anytime soon. (“Soon,” here, is measured in tens of thousands of years.) 

(continues)

LIGHT OF THE STARS 
Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth 
By Adam Frank 
262 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

Losing Earth: The decade we almost stopped climate change

https://nyti.ms/2NMqJxq

==
How Record Heat Wreaked Havoc on Four Continents

Expect more. That’s the verdict of climate scientists to the record-high temperatures this spring and summer in vastly different climate zones.

The continental United States had its hottest month of May and the third-hottest month of June. Japan was walloped by record triple-digit temperatures, killing at least 86 people in what its meteorological agency bluntly called a “disaster.” And weather stations logged record-high temperatures on the edge of the Sahara and above the Arctic Circle.

Is it because of climate change? Scientists with the World Weather Attribution project concluded in a study released Friday that the likelihood of the heat wave currently baking Northern Europe is “more than two times higher today than if human activities had not altered climate.”

While attribution studies are not yet available for other record-heat episodes this year, scientists say there’s little doubt that the ratcheting up of global greenhouse gases makes heat waves more frequent and more intense... (continues)

Best books on trees

1. Five Books‏ @five_books Jul 28
   

   “We’re often unconscious of just how vigorous the assaults on our attention have become. But we’re counter-evolving.” The best books on Trees, a #readinglist by @univofthesouth biologist @DGHaskell

	Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane)
7/28/18, 1:58 AM "A forest is a co-operative system...We need to understand deeper, more viscerally, what’s going on in trees, these living creatures". Fine interview w/ Suzanne Simard, pioneer-discoverer of the "wood wide web" & how trees to "talk to each other". Here: e360.yale.edu/features/explo… pic.twitter.com/QkcxBliYPy

Who Was the Real Lorax?

Seeking the Inspiration for Dr. Seuss
A new essay explores the possible real-life examples for the Lorax character and Truffula trees.

What inspired the creature who was “shortish and oldish and brownish and mossy?” The one who spoke in a voice that was “sharpish and bossy?” He spoke for the trees, yet he called them his own. All that he left “in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with the one word … ‘UNLESS.’”

In 1970, millions of people observed Earth Day for the first time, and the Environmental Protection Agency was born. Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” topped the charts.

And in La Jolla, Calif., Theodor Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, was fighting to keep a suburban development project from clearing the Eucalyptus trees around his home. But when he tried to write a book about conservation for children that wasn’t preachy or boring, he got writer’s block.

At his wife’s suggestion to clear his mind, they traveled to the Mount Kenya Safari Club, an exclusive resort where guests watched animals along Kenya’s Laikipia plateau.

And if you haven’t guessed by now, it was there that “The Lorax” took shape — on the blank side of a laundry list, nearly all of its environmental message created in a single afternoon.

Today it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, sold more than a million copies and adapted into a 2012 film. It was Dr. Seuss’s favorite book and one that was much discussed for its environmental resonance.

In it, the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees,” pops up from a chopped-down tree stump and angrily demands that a businessman called the Once-ler stop cutting down Truffula trees to knit “thneeds.” But the Once-ler doesn’t listen and eventually is left alone in a crumbling, empty factory on a barren landscape.

Despite an unsuccessful attempt by the logging industry to ban “The Lorax” in the 1980s, many have embraced the storybook as a critical tale about environmental policy, especially for children, ultimately heeding a hopeful message that future generations can save the environment by caring for it. But some have worried that Lorax, with his possessive use of “my” when referring to the trees and other creatures, isn’t really a good teaching model because he comes off as a self-righteous eco-warrior with an unfounded anger.

In an essay published Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the authors argue that the Lorax may not have been as bossy and ineffectual as he seems. Rather, the authors posit that Lorax may have been involved in a type of symbiotic relationship with the Truffula trees and his surroundings, threatened and defensive.

“The prevailing sense among literary critics is that the Lorax is too angry and that environmentalists can’t afford to adopt that kind of rhetoric because it will never work with policymakers,” said Nathaniel Dominy, an anthropologist and evolutionary ecologist at Dartmouth College and lead author of the paper. “If you see the Lorax not as some indignant steward of the environment, but instead, as a participating member of the ecosystem, then I think his anger is so much more understandable, and I think, forgivable.”

(continues)

"We're doomed. Now what?"

...Living ethically means understanding that our actions have consequences, taking responsibility for how those consequences ripple out across the web of life in which each of us is irrevocably enmeshed and working every day to ease what suffering we can. Living ethically means limiting our desires, respecting the deep interdependence of all things in nature and honoring the fact that our existence on this planet is a gift that comes from nowhere and may be taken back at any time.

I can’t protect my daughter from the future and I can’t even promise her a better life. All I can do is teach her: teach her how to care, how to be kind and how to live within the limits of nature’s grace. I can teach her to be tough but resilient, adaptable and prudent, because she’s going to have to struggle for what she needs. But I also need to teach her to fight for what’s right, because none of us is in this alone. I need to teach her that all things die, even her and me and her mother and the world we know, but that coming to terms with this difficult truth is the beginning of wisdom. 

Roy Scranton, The Stone

5 best books on radical environmentalism

 Robert Macfarlane Retweeted

Robert Macfarlane‏Verified account @RobGMacfarlane Jul 12

"I have an affinity for Emily Dickinson. She saved my life." @DaeganMiller's choice of the five best books of "radical environmentalism", the "shining core of which is to open up our circle of concern".

James Hansen was right

The night before the day that would make him famous, James E. Hansen listened to a baseball game on the radio. But his mind kept wandering: What would he say to Congress the next day to convey that humans were endangering the planet?

He had long been trying to raise the alarm without success, and so had other scientists. But then, on June 23, 1988 — 30 years ago Saturday — a Colorado senator named Tim Wirth convened yet another hearing on the topic. Dr. Hansen was one of several scientists on the witness list.

Few people had ever heard of him, nor of the obscure NASA unit that he headed. He and a small group of colleagues studied the Earth’s climate, working in a suite of offices above the Manhattan diner that “Seinfeld” would later make famous.

He had conducted rigorous studies of historical temperatures, concluding that the planet was warming sharply. He had helped to pioneer computer modeling of the climate, and the results predicted further warming if people kept pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (continues)

Speaking (finally) for the trees

A Renewed View of Some of the World’s Oldest Trees
After a three-year restoration project, the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park has reopened, with less asphalt and more concern for the health of the trees.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — John Muir, the naturalist who was most at home sleeping outdoors on a bed of pine needles in the Sierra Nevada, called giant sequoias the “noblest of God’s trees.”

For three years, some of the most striking examples of these towering marvels were off limits to visitors in Yosemite National Park. After a $40 million renovation — the largest restoration project in the park’s history — the Mariposa Grove, a collection of around 500 mature giant sequoias, reopened last week.

What Muir called a “forest masterpiece” is now back on display.

The renovation addressed a problem that the park has struggled with for years. On the busiest summer days, more than 7,000 cars may converge on the park, which is about a four-hour drive from San Francisco. The gridlock they create amid the stunning chutes of water running down the steep granite slopes of Yosemite’s glacier-carved valley results in a kind of drive-by naturalism that frustrates many...

(continues)

"We are nature"

	Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane)
5/12/18, 10:27 AM "We are not separate from nature. We are nature, an ancient truth that can perhaps most clearly be seen through the eyes of lakes": fine @curtstager essay on the deep-time lessons of Thoreau's Walden's Pond. nautil.us/issue/60/searc…

Electric cars next

	TIME (@TIME)
5/8/18, 5:45 PM 20% of Americans say their next car will be electric, a survey by AAA has found ti.me/2rtDALn

Joel Kovel

Joel Kovel, a former Freudian psychiatrist who evolved into an apostle of what he called ecosocialism, a so-called green-and-red agenda against the environmental evils of globalization and in favor of the nonviolent eradication of capitalism, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 81...

Under ecosocialist theory, income would be guaranteed, most property and means of production would be commonly owned, and the abolition of capitalism, globalism and imperialism would unleash environmentalists to vastly curtail industrialization and development whose pollution would otherwise cause catastrophic global warming.

“Capitalist production, in its endless search for profit, seeks to turn everything into a commodity,” Dr. Kovel wrote in 2007 on the socialist website Climate and Capitalism. “It is plain that production will have to shift from being dominated by exchange — the path of the commodity — to that which is for use, that is for the direct meeting of human needs.”

obit