Our Crime Against the Planet, and Ourselves

This is the fourth in a series of dialogues with philosophers and critical theorists about violence. This conversation is with Adrian Parr, a professor of environmental politics and cultural criticism at the University of Cincinnati and the director of the Taft Research Center. Her most recent book is “The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics.”

Natasha Lennard: In your work, you raise the idea of framing climate degradation as a form of violence, and potentially as a crime against humanity. What does it mean to speak of the human destruction of the climate in terms of criminal justice? Is there a distinct guilty party that can be held responsible for this crime?

Adrian Parr: There are three components to the claim that environmental degradation is a crime against humanity. First, it is an appeal to a universal, common humanity that stretches across space and time, and that is oblivious to geographic and historical differences. Second, the crime in question is an existential one that is committed against the very experience of being human, the human élan. Third, it is a crime that calls the established legal order into question, because everyone, and yet no one specifically, can be held responsible.

What is the nature of this crime? The human species is the agent of a terrible injustice being perpetrated against other species, future generations, ecosystems and our fellow human beings. Examples include contaminated waterways, mass species extinction, massive fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable rates of deforestation, to name just a few. This is leading to extreme and more frequent weather events, expanding deserts, loss of biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, water depletion and contamination, and the rise of global sea levels... (continues)

Earth Day 2016

A presentation to the Students for Environmental Action at Middle Tennessee State University (SEAofMTSU) in recognition of Earth Week, April 21, 2016.

Earth day 2016 (1) from Osopher

The urgent need to slow down

A Conversation with Elizabeth Kolbert and Matthieu Ricard

Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard each had big books in 2015. Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction—takes an unflinching look at the history of extinction and the different ways that human beings are negatively impacting life on the planet. Ricard’s Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World explores global challenges, such as climate change, and argues that compassion and altruism are the keys to creating a better future. Together these books—filled with grief and hope—feel like two sides of a coin, each necessary for understanding what it means to be alive during humanity’s greatest crisis.

Sam Mowe of The Garrison Institute recently spoke with Kolbert and Ricard to discuss emotional responses to distressing environmental news, the importance of slowing down, and the role of art in environmental solutions.

Sam Mowe: Elizabeth, we’ve talked about this before, but is a devastating book. Was it emotionally challenging for you to report on these issues?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, when you set out to write a book, on some level you have some sense of what you’re getting into. Otherwise, you wouldn’t write it. So on some level, I’d say I had already absorbed the message. It is a very grim message. If you’re not devastated by it, then the book has not done its job.

But one of the ironies that I experienced in the process of writing this book about how humans are really effective at destroying life on the planet is that I went to all of these amazing places and saw just how fantastic the world is. Carl Safina has said something like, “The more I sense the miracle, the greater I sense the tragedy.”

Sam Mowe: Matthieu, I know that you are also aware of the bleak facts, but even so, in your book you quote somebody as saying, “It’s too late to be a pessimist.” How are you able to stay optimistic in the face of distressing environmental news?

                                                                                   (Photograph  ©MatthieuRicard)

Matthieu Ricard: It’s interesting that you mention this emotional reaction to climate news, because, actually, the problem is precisely that it is very hard for us to be emotionally moved by something that will happen in the future. Of course, the worst of climate change is coming closer and closer, but it won’t happen tomorrow. The reason for this emotional disconnect is quite simple: evolution has equipped us to react to immediate danger. If there’s a rhinoceros coming at a group of people full speed, everybody gets up and runs. If you say, “There’s a rhinoceros coming in 30 years,” people will ask, “What’s the problem?”

Sam Mowe: The reason I’m interested in this question of emotional responses is because behavioral scientists say that people are frozen by bad news and motivated by positive messaging. This creates a challenge for those working for environmental change.

Matthieu Ricard: All my photographic work is about showing the beauty and the wonder we have in terms of nature—implying, of course, how incredibly sad it would be if it was all destroyed. We need to inspire. But we also need to be honest about what’s going to happen in the future if we don’t put our full energy, ingenuity, creativity, determination, and decision making towards solving this crisis.

Elizabeth Kolbert: I think that also gets to this question of messaging. I hear that all the time, that people don’t want to hear negative messages. To a certain extent, I think that is a construction of our consumer culture, which is precisely the problem. We don’t want to hear negative messages because they’re not part of this affirming culture that we live in that tells us all, to quote McDonald’s, “You deserve a break today,” or whatever. That is part of this whole communications apparatus that’s been built around actually trying to prop up consumerism. And if that’s the problem, then maybe we really need to examine all of the precepts behind that.

Also, the idea that people are only motivated by good news is clearly not true. If something is coming at you—say, a rhinoceros—you get out of the way. Clearly, we’re very much motivated by fear, and fear has mobilized us many times.

Matthieu Ricard: When there is genuine fear because of real danger, to ignore it is stupid. What we don’t need is unreasonable fear or fear that comes as lagging anxiety—sometimes the fear alarm is on for reasons that are not justified. Sometimes what we call fear, is simply common sense. If you were walking towards a cliff, you would not be taken by fear and emotion. You would just decide that you should stop before you fall over.

Sam Mowe: It seems that a lot of this consumer culture that Elizabeth was just speaking about is also driven by fear—fear of not having enough or being good enough as you are.

Matthieu Ricard: Yes, we need the ability to recognize when a fear is reasonable.

Sam Mowe: Let’s talk about time scales. Elizabeth, one of the points that you make in is that humans have been altering the planet for a really long time, sort of like it’s in our DNA to do so. So it’s going to be challenging to change our behavior overnight. And, Matthieu, you talk about the value of slowing down. So there seems to be this tension between the urgency of the moment and then the long-term project of changing human nature or at least slowing it down.

Elizabeth Kolbert: I think that the idea about slowing down very much gets to the heart of the matter. To the extent that we are a world-altering species—and I do think it’s pretty clear that we’ve been at this project for a very long time—what makes us very destructive, unfortunately, is our capacity to change things on a time scale that is orders of magnitude faster than other creatures can evolve to deal with.

But there is a difference between what we were doing when we were hunting some mastodons and what we’re doing today. Our impact on the planet has been called “the great acceleration.” Becoming aware of our capacity to change the planet could be a good thing and could potentially lead us to reassess a lot of the things we do. However, I try to never say, “Things are going to change,” because I don’t see any evidence of that. But I certainly think that there’s a possibility for change.

Matthieu Ricard: It’s not contradictory to speak of an emergency to slow down. It’s not like you are frantically nervous while slowing down. It’s just that it is time to slow down. All of those terms—slowing down, simplicity, doing more with less—people respond to them by saying, “Oh, I’m not going to be able to eat strawberry ice cream anymore.” They feel bad about that. But, actually, what they miss is that voluntary simplicity that turns out to be a very happy way of life. There have been very many good studies showing that again and again. Jim Casa studied people with a highly materialistic consumerism mindset. He studied 10,000 people over 20 years and compared them with those who more put value on intrinsic things—quality of relationships, relationship to nature—and he found the high consumer-minded people are less happy. They look for outside pleasures and don’t find relationship satisfaction. Their health is not as good. They have fewer good friends. They are less concerned about global issues like the environment. They are less empathic. They are more obsessed with debt.

So I think we have to realize that we can find joy and happiness and fulfillment without buying a big iPad, then a mini iPad and then a middle-sized iPad.

Sam Mowe: Do you think that contemplative practices can help people come to that realization?

Matthieu Ricard: For me, contemplation means to cultivate skills, inner strength and determination to better serve others and to serve causes that are worth serving. It’s like gaining the inner resources to deal with the ups and downs of life and to deal with the adverse circumstances, the sheer determination and compassionate courage. So, yes, I think contemplation can help set priorities.

Sam Mowe: Elizabeth, do you think spirituality has a place in climate discussions or do you see it as more of a policy and financial issue?

Elizabeth Kolbert:  I do think spirituality has a place in the discussions, understanding spirituality very broadly here in terms of thoughtfulness and self-control. Changing our energy systems is obviously a huge technological challenge, but I think the mistake that is often made is that people think we’re going to change our energy systems, and then we’re going to just continue to live as before. But if you just give people more energy—and it might be a carbon-free source of energy—and they’re going to use it to cut down the rainforest, then you have potentially solved or ameliorated one problem only to worsen another problem. So how we use these technologies that we deploy makes a huge difference, and I don’t think that without any form of self-control that we’re going to get out of this mess. So we’re going to need massive amounts of both technology and self-control simultaneously.

Sam Mowe: How can we achieve that level of self-control as individuals and as a society?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, I don’t have a good answer for that, and I don’t claim to have any expertise in this area. I can barely control my three kids. But right now in the U.S., you know, one of our favorite phrases is “the sky’s the limit.” I think there are possibilities of different social norms that have very different values.

Matthieu Ricard: There are many ways to do this. But, yes, the idea is that we need to cultivate some fundamental human values and that are different from our current ways our life.

                                                                                    (Photograph ©MatthieuRicard)

Sam Mowe: Do either of you think that art can help us reset our views of nature and help us change our values in the way you’re talking about?

Elizabeth Kolbert: I think art potentially has a huge role to play, and part of that is because so many of us are living in urban settings and we can’t all go off and visit the Amazon. And we shouldn’t be doing that anyway, to be honest. So I think that reaching people through all sorts of different media—and breaking through that inattention to what many people would consider to be unpleasant, unhappy news—is useful.

There is the great Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” There are many people working on this, and I’ve worked with a couple of different artists on this sort of thing. Whether any of this is having any success in the sense of actually motivating action, as opposed to just being good art or bad art, I can’t really comment on that.

Matthieu Ricard: I try to do this through my photography. I think of it as a way to be witness to the beauty of nature and to share it with people who live in cities, to remind them of the beauty of the world. So I think that can be a major source of inspiration for positive change.

Sam Mowe: I ask that question partly because I sometimes experience information overload and it seems like art might be a way to cut through the information and connect your heart to the issues.

Matthieu Ricard: Yes, but I think we must go directly to the issue and not naively hope that by listening to Bach we will somehow realize we need renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. I’m not sure there’s too much of a direct connection.

Elizabeth Kolbert: Yes, I really agree with that. I think that there’s room for all sorts of creative efforts, and I applaud them, but I think there is a problem when people mistake some kind of presentation or artwork or discussion for action. You can say they both have utility, but you cannot confuse them.

Matthieu Ricard: If you are on a boat that is going straight towards a big waterfall, it’s of no use to play soft music.

Elizabeth Kolbert: Exactly. Or maybe there is, but you shouldn’t convince yourself it’s going to prevent you from going over the edge.

(Originally published at The Garrison Institute Blog)

Environmental Ethics Fall 2016

Returning to MTSU, Fall 2016- 

Environmental Ethics 

Priority registration for Fall '16 is coming soon. If you're interested in/concerned about the health and future of "the only home we've ever known," consider registering for PHIL 3340, Environmental Ethics - TTh 4:20, BAS ___ MW 2:20, JUB 202 More info at http://envirojpo.blogspot.com/, or email phil.oliver@mtsu.edu. 

Some presidential candidates' recent statements* give plenty of cause for concern. Climate change, says one, is "very low on the list... we have much bigger problems.” Another explicitly rejects the science of global warming as just a flawed "computer model." And another admits the science but says jobs matter more.

And yet there are important glimmers of hope, as sustainable alternatives to the fossil industry continue to make unprecedented forward strides. Our focus in the course will be on the political opposition to an effective response to environmental degradation, AND on genuine reasons for optimism that such a response is still within our reach. 

TEXTS:  

• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein 

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.

• Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis by Tim Flannery 

Time is running out, but catastrophe is not inevitable. Around the world people are now living with the consequences of an altered climate—with intensified and more frequent storms, wildfires, droughts and floods. For some it’s already a question of survival. Drawing on the latest science, Flannery gives a snapshot of the trouble we are in and more crucially, proposes a new way forward, including rapidly progressing clean technologies and a “third way” of soft geo-engineering.

== 

*http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/266716-climate-change-where-the-gop-field-stands 

More info at http://envirojpo.blogspot.com/, or email phil.oliver@mtsu.edu. 

And then came a Yes

"After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends"

The Forgotten Father of Environmentalism

One of my winter break diversions: Andrea Wolf's  The Invention of Nature, about Alexander von Humboldt. He "revolutionized the Western conception of nature by describing it as an interconnected living web—and in doing so, inspired thinkers from Darwin to Thoreau..."

Alexander von Humboldt was born in 1769 into a wealthy Prussian aristocratic family, but he later left his life of privilege to explore Latin America for five years—a voyage that made him legendary across the world. Humboldt threw himself into physical exertion, pushing his body to the limits. He ventured deep into the mysterious world of the rainforest in Venezuela and crawled onto narrow rock ledges at a precarious height in the Andes to see the flames inside an active volcano. Even as a 60–year–old, he traveled more than 10,000 miles to the remotest corners of Russia. He was curious, charismatic, and incredibly restless—impelled by a “perpetual drive,” he admitted, as if chased by “10,000 pigs.”

He risked his life many times, experimented on his own body to learn more about the world and believed that knowledge had to be shared and made accessible for everybody. He was handsome, adventurous, and worked at a frenzied pace—fueled by his love for nature and science but also by large amounts of coffee which he called “concentrated sunshine.”

(continues)

Power to the People

Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous.

By Bill McKibben

 Mark and Sara Borkowski live with their two young daughters in a century-old, fifteen-hundred-square-foot house in Rutland, Vermont. Mark drives a school bus, and Sara works as a special-ed teacher; the cost of heating and cooling their house through the year consumes a large fraction of their combined income. Last summer, however, persuaded by Green Mountain Power, the main electric utility in Vermont, the Borkowskis decided to give their home an energy makeover. In the course of several days, coördinated teams of contractors stuffed the house with new insulation, put in a heat pump for the hot water, and installed two air-source heat pumps to warm the home. They also switched all the light bulbs to L.E.D.s and put a small solar array on the slate roof of the garage.

The Borkowskis paid for the improvements, but the utility financed the charges through their electric bill, which fell the very first month. Before the makeover, from October of 2013 to January of 2014, the Borkowskis used thirty-four hundred and eleven kilowatt-hours of electricity and three hundred and twenty-five gallons of fuel oil. From October of 2014 to January of 2015, they used twenty-eight hundred and fifty-six kilowatt-hours of electricity and no oil at all. President Obama has announced that by 2025 he wants the United States to reduce its total carbon footprint by up to twenty-eight per cent of 2005 levels. The Borkowskis reduced the footprint of their house by eighty-eight per cent in a matter of days, and at no net cost.

I’ve travelled the world writing about and organizing against climate change, but, standing in the Borkowskis’ kitchen and looking at their electric bill, I felt a fairly rare emotion: hope. The numbers reveal a sudden new truth—that innovative, energy-saving and energy-producing technology is now cheap enough for everyday use. The Borkowskis’ house is not an Aspen earth shelter made of adobe and old tires, built by a former software executive who converted to planetary consciousness at Burning Man. It’s an utterly plain house, with Frozen bedspreads and One Direction posters, inhabited by a working-class family of four, two rabbits, and a parakeet named Oliver. It sits in a less than picturesque neighborhood, in a town made famous in recent years for its heroin problem. Its significance lies in its ordinariness. The federal Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz, has visited, along with the entire Vermont congressional delegation. If you can make a house like this affordably green, you should be able to do it anywhere...

 

(continues)

Keep it in the ground

Bill McKibben: 

THE Obama administration’s decision to give Shell Oil the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic shows why we may never win the fight against climate change. Even in this most extreme circumstance, no one seems able to stand up to the power of the fossil fuel industry. No one ever says no.

By “extreme” I don’t just mean that Shell will be drilling for oil in places where there’s no hope of cleaning up the inevitable spills (remember the ineptness of BP in the balmy, accessible Gulf of Mexico, and now transpose it 40 degrees of latitude north, into some of the harshest seas on the planet).

No, what’s most extreme here is the irresponsibility of Shell, now abetted by the White House. A quarter century ago, scientists warned that if we kept burning fossil fuel at current rates we’d melt the Arctic. The fossil fuel industry (and most everyone else in power) ignored those warnings, and what do you know: The Arctic is melting, to the extent that people now are planning to race yachts through the Northwest Passage, which until very recently required an icebreaker to navigate.

Now, having watched the Arctic melt, does Shell take that experience and conclude that it’s in fact time to invest heavily in solar panels and wind turbines? No. Instead, it applies to be first in line to drill for yet more oil in the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Siberia. Wash, rinse, repeat. Talk about salting wounds and adding insult to injury: It’s as if the tobacco companies were applying for permission to put cigarette machines in cancer wards.

And the White House gave Shell the license. In his first term, President Obama mostly ignored climate change, and he ran for re-election barely mentioning the subject until Hurricane Sandy made it unavoidable in the closing days of the campaign.

Theoretically his second term was going to be different. The president has stepped up the rhetoric, and he’s shown some willingness to go after domestic greenhouse gas emissions. His new regulations on coal-fired power plants will be helpful, as will his 2012 rules on fuel efficiency for cars and trucks. And his nonbinding pledge that America will cut emissions in future decades may make the upcoming climate talks in Paris less of a fiasco than earlier talks in Copenhagen.

But you can’t deal with climate on the demand side alone. If we keep digging up more coal, gas and oil, it will get burned, if not here, then somewhere else. This is precisely the conclusion that a study in the journal Nature reached in January: If we’re to have any chance of meeting even Mr. Obama’s weak goal of holding temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, we have to leave most carbon underground. That paper, in particular, showed that the coal reserves in the Powder River basin in the West and the oil in Canada’s tar sands had to be left largely untouched, and that there was no climate-friendly scenario in which any oil or gas could be drilled in the Arctic.

And yet Mr. Obama — acting on his own, since these are all executive actions requiring nothing from Congress — has opened huge swaths of the Powder River basin to new coal mining. He’s still studying whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, though the country’s leading climate scientists have all told him it would be a disaster. And now he’s given Shell the green light, meaning that, as with Keystone, it will be up to the environmental movement to block the plan (“kayaktivists” plan to gather this weekend in Seattle’s harbor, trying to prevent Shell from basing its Arctic rigs there).

This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.

Bill McKibben, nyt

Michael Pollan's Trip Treatment

The food ethics guru notes his return to a theme he explored in Botany of Desire, which we read a while back in Environmental Ethics. He's lately

been immersed for much of the last year in a new project, the first fruits of which appear in the February 9 issue of the New Yorker, out today.  I’m eager to share this piece with you because the research has been some of the most exciting I’ve done. “The Trip Treatment” is a long narrative exploring the current renaissance of scientific and medical research into psychedelic drugs. My story looks at several recent and ongoing trials of psilocybin–the active ingredient in magic mushrooms—at Johns Hopkins, N.Y.U. and Imperial College in London, through the eyes of both the researchers and the volunteers. The U.S. trials involve giving cancer patients a guided psychedelic journey to help them cope with their fear and anxiety; most of the volunteers I followed found that the mystical experience they had on the drug radically altered their thinking about life and death.  Psychedelics are also being used to treat addictions (for smoking and alcohol); to explore the neuroscience of spirituality, and, in conjunction with various brain scanning technologies, to try to answer some fascinating questions about the self and consciousness. Here’s a link to the article, which is posted today:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment?mbid=social_twitter This might at first seem like a departure from writing about food. But those who have followed my work for some time know I’ve also had a longstanding interest in altered states of consciousness. I wrote about cannabis in The Botany of Desire and opium in Harper’s Magazine.  For me, these remarkable molecules are part of the same co-evolutionary story, products of nature with the power to change us.

And in such power comes the possibility of changing our environment and how we engage it. CoEvolution thus becomes companion to CoPhilosophy.

Environmental rock stars talk before the walk

Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, and others at the Talk before the Walk, the night before the 9/21 climate change march in NYC:

Environmental Enlightenment

Part 1

The many categorical ways of approaching climate change is currently a never-ending roll down a metaphorical mountain. A mountain that outlooks an even worse horizon, like the panning of the screen of Frodo in Lord of the Rings as he comes closer to Mount Mordor. Laughably, this planet goes through wave after wave of activism on top of differentiating theories that explain how we got to this point in our worlds ecological demise. Generations following past presence of habit formed a horrible idea in which the results have ended up pushing the human touch on nature to a boiling point, literally. So many problems have risen due to the ignorance of not facing an ecological disaster such as global warming, ice caps melting, etc. What we need isn't another policy on oil or natural gas consumption, alternative energy devotion, or the likes of anything revolving around this tight circle of movement, rather we must all come to the same conclusion on sacrificing short term goals for long-term. It's not the selfish devotion to drilling for that sweet black liquid offshore, causing catastrophic malfunctions of brittle ecosystems, it's not embarking on straining, costly campaigns to end pipeline creation, it's the fact we all must get the same idea as those ecosystems of community like that of trees, those that span lifetimes of age, with interconnected webs of networks larger than states, wide. A change, mattering not to how or what, but when. Our time on this planet has been running on E for a while now, so what will it take to compromise that short for long, that comeuppance of integrity from not just a few but from all. This outlook spans many alleys and endless discussion, those who agree or disagree with the fact that this planets changing for the worse, and has been, shouldn't be a political debate or something simple to agree you with your relatives at the dinner table. We must understand all that is available to be understood so that someday, whether it happens in 5 or 50 years, will better our decisions on understanding that we aren't a part of this planet just because we can be, but that we can leave it for later generations. Because of this overabundance of information on this topic, we look at 'Oil and Honey' by Bill McKibben, as well as selections from Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything'. From communal living to activism both domestic and abroad, we are going to understand the broader picture that is environmental ethics, concern, and rehabilitation, or at least a small glimpse of it to better our individual associations with the planet that houses us graciously.  

Our first look into one of the many outlets of idealism towards a better, much more cleaner tomorrow is illustrated in Bill McKibbens 'Oil and Honey'. In it he details things like bee farming, silent calls of despair from mountain tops and tree removal, even the eventual uprising of an organization he founded (350.org), who is on the forefront of one the latest disasters facing not only this planet, but the United States. That disaster is the XL Keystone Pipeline, which, if approved, would go from the tar sands of Alberta, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. The reason being that not only would wildlife be affected all through the projected pipeline area but as well as human beings that are in the pipelines path. But XL isn't the only thing 350 is pushing its focus on, the organization has spread its wings all over the planet.  Bill didn't know the break-though his organization would make early in its life and through the 2000's and on. He seemed scared of what would become of him; being a writer, a good one at that, first, then an activist second, was his main idea, but because of how important people saw this organizations outlook on how government needed to re-regulate what had been broken not so long ago, McKibben was outright intimidated by himself. Not in it that made us think that he couldn't or wouldn't handle his circumstance, but that there was definitely an outlet needed. On top of visiting his peaceful places up in the mountains in the Northwest, he befriended a beekeeper from Vermont. Bill paid for this plot of land to loan to the beekeeper on an attempt to start something small, eventually a self regulating piece of property that this man was caretaker for. Bill came around every once in a while if stressing about getting all these people out a jail after protests in D.C. to stop XL from being signed in the White House to bigger picture ideas outside the country as well. The reason I feel that the whole idea of keeping to a small piece of land and starting a bee farm on it showed that this idea of communal living was a possibility to start a new wave of activism from spending so much on things wanted and going back to creating your own needs. The books title was just a commitment to deriving ideas from not only protesting big oil but even relating comparing a bee colony to capitalism itself. Bill used the efficiency of these bee's do what they did, day in day out, creating a whole organized community, taking care of their queen, and surviving long plights of cold through the Northern winters. What he was saying was that because the bees did their jobs so great and efficient, he saw people in big corporations were doing the same thing. Creating a product so efficient that it got in the way of the long term picture. Big Oil in comparison shows a never-ending (or so it seems), churning cycle of making as much as money as long as possible without any consequence. But what was awesome about the bee's after many generations of colonies adapting to their specified conditions, the beekeeper started seeing something quite interesting. The bee's started surviving over those intense winters. He started selling these specialized queens of these current generations for profit; this was the first time a northern beekeeper was able to see the outcome that had eventually brought itself to fruition. I find that it’s a pretty good prediction of what one way we, as humans, will be able to do for ourselves. To better our current situation by creating a self sustainable ideal of community. Less pollution, less waste, less worry for the future. As we discussed in our meeting, an idea must be all together had and acquired throughout all not just a few, like those 4-5 who started 350.org not knowing what the future would even hold for them. Again, only a small idea of current waste management, the idea is still there to understand that this enlightenment must be had, not by the political elite, those in extreme wealth too uninterested of the average person, but the general population. Because global warming is too touchy of an issue in politics that our leaders are obviously not interested in the rights and freedoms of those who they supposedly lead, we must all let it be heard, that the future of ourselves and our, hopeful, later generations have been in danger for far too long. McKibben showed us the comparisons and contrasts of that of bee's and oil corporations on top of knowing an idea bigger than just a few must acquire in themselves, but his role in activism obviously was given to those who were better equipped. His colleagues knew he did a beautiful job in starting a new environmental movement that has starting chugging along at slow, but steady, speed. His book was not a slap in the face but definitely a step toward the path that Naomi Klein in 'This Changes Everything', was wanting to push us, forcefully, down to show us that we can no longer just sit and twiddle our thumbs over what could have, and will be.