What’s really broken?
I think there is more brokenness in focusing on sexual identity differences rather than on trying to confront and heal the broken systems which harm people and planet.
Category Archives: ecotheology
Why should Climate Change matter to me?
“To care about a changing climate, we don’t have to be a scientist or an environmentalist or a liberal political activist. We just have to be a human who wants this planet, the only one we have, to be a safe home for all of us.” — Katharine Hayhoe
“the cost to nature is only one part of the story”
David Wallace-Wells’ own description of the subject of his new book, at the end of the opening from which I have been quoting: “What follows is a kaleidoscopic accounting of the human costs of human life continuing as it has for a generation, which will fill up the planet with only more humans—what ongoing global warming spells for public health, Continue Reading
“Slow walk” on Climate Action far more expensive than all-out effort to address it properly
Just one more of those things that infuriates me about we as a people of the earth: “Slow-walking action on climate, another paper found, will cost the world $26 trillion by just 2030.” Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 33). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. And we have people saying “It costs too much! That’ll wreck the economy! ” Bigtime, deadly B.S.
interlocking effects; still being discovered
So, in a paragraph soon to follow the pieces I just challenged, regarding how they seem to be unaware of the “baked in” effects of 1 or 2 decades ago, he writes this: “Carbon hangs in the air for decades, with some of the most terrifying feedbacks unspooling over even longer time horizons—which gives warming the eerie shimmer of an Continue Reading
The danger of placing too much hope in “Geo-engineering”
Wallace-Wells follows that notion I just “cautioned” about, with another not so helpful notion: “We found a way to engineer devastation, and we can find a way to engineer our way out of it—or, rather, engineer our way toward a degraded muddle, but one that nevertheless extends forward the promise of new generations finding their own way forward, perhaps toward Continue Reading
The “Baked in” consequences
Here’s a notion that Wallace-Wells forwards in his book and to people who ask him about “hope” in the face of his “bleak picture”, which I think paints a false picture: “No matter how out-of-control the climate system seems—with its roiling typhoons, unprecedented famines and heat waves, refugee crises and climate conflicts—we are all its authors. And still writing.” Wallace-Wells, Continue Reading
How the modern myth of unending progress has decimated the earth
(Forgive the length of this, but this began as a reply to a comment elsewhere, and turned into a much longer train of thought) A movie called “The Book of Eli” was about a man, in a post apocalyptic world protecting the Bible he obtained/salvaged from an evil despot who sought the book in order to use it to solidify Continue Reading
What the hell have we been thinking?
“The United Nations established its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, signaling to all the world a scientific consensus about the problem. Since then, we have done more damage, knowingly, than we did over preceding centuries, in ignorance.” This needs to be realized, so we can get a grasp on the recognition that causes us to ask: “What the Continue Reading
The “forgotten” appreciation for Apocalypse in genre
The final sentence of the previous quote from the Wallace-Wells book provides a good explanation of why I think we need to utilize and “recover” an ancient purpose of the apocalyptic genre: “There is simply no analogy to draw on, outside of mythology and theology—and perhaps the Cold War prospect of mutually assured destruction.” Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. Continue Reading
“in two generations, the entire story of human civilization”
This guy writes very well. And sees very well. And processes very well. “climate change is .. an “existential crisis”—a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between two hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome puts us on the brink of extinction. Rhetoric often fails us Continue Reading
A Basic Fact of Ecological Economics
I’m gonna have to stop reading soon. I need to go to bed, and I will need to be able to sleep then. “Every degree of warming, it’s been estimated, costs a temperate country like the United States about one percentage point of GDP, and according to one recent paper, at 1.5 degrees the world would be $20 trillion richer Continue Reading
Surely a different “nature”
This is horrific:“In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died; in just the last twenty-five, one study of German nature preserves found, the flying insect population declined by three-quarters.” Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 25-26). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. This just in from a phone call Continue Reading
A global crisis requires cooperation
“If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we Continue Reading
Feedback Loops
Back to the Wallace-Wells book, on “Feedback loops”: “A warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster still, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still. A warming planet will also melt Arctic permafrost, which Continue Reading