Naomi Klein - ‘This Changes Everything : Capitalism vs The Climate’

(When) posing climate change as the battle between capitalism and the planet…..the battle is already underway, but right now capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made.

It wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crisis is to open up their beautiful seas high-risk oil and gas drilling.

It wins when Canadians are told our only hope fo not ending up like Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisolid bitumen from Alberta tar sands.

It wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall.

It wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price to pay for economic progress.

It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

 

 

This weeks Green Thought comes from Canadian author, journalist and social activist Naomi Kleins 2014 book ‘This Changes Everything : Capitalism vs The Climate’.  I felt that it would be unrealistic to send out the whole book [This Changes Everything] as a Green Thought, but it would be a very good idea to do so. I thoroughly recommend that everyone reads this excellent book.  JG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Changes_Everything

Robert Heilbroner - Business Civilization in Decline

‘(Advertising is) perhaps the single most value-destroying activity of a business civilisation’ due to the ‘subversive influence of the relentless effort to persuade people to change their life ways, not out of any knowledge of, or deeply held convictions of the ‘good life’, but merely to sell whatever article or service is being pandered’

 

 

This  weeks Green Thought comes from the 1976 book ‘Business Civilization in Decline by the late american economist Robert Heilbroner (1919-2005).

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Heilbroner

Frank Herbert - ‘The Ecology of Dune'

The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system.

A system!  

A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses.

The untrained miss the collapse until too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

 

Taken from ‘The Ecology of Dune’, an appendix in Frank Herberts 1965 brilliant sci-fi novel Dune. [If you haven’t read it – Why? (JG)]

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_%28novel%29

The full text of the ecology of Dune can be found here:
http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/Dune-AppendixI.htm

Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje - Cherish the Earth

Lots of people eat meat because they like the taste. They do it without thinking. But imagine if you were that sheep: if what happens to that sheep were done to you, how would you feel ?

 

The entry for March in the Tibetan Buddhist 17^th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje in ‘ Cherish the Earth’ the 2015 Environment Calendar.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogyen_Trinley_Dorje

http://kagyuoffice.org/

John Michael Greer - ‘The Archdruid Report’

Underlying all the grand and sweeping fantasies of endless economic growth powered somehow by lukewarm sunlight and inconstant wind, I’ve come to think, lies the simple fact that the human mind never quite got around to evolving the capacity to think in terms of the huge amounts of energy our species currently, and briefly, has at its disposal.

It’s one thing to point out that a planeload of tourists flying from Los Angeles to Cairo to see the Great Pyramid, back when political conditions in Egypt allowed for that, used more energy in that one flight than it took to build the Great Pyramid in the first place. It’s quite another to understand exactly what that means – to get some sense of the effort it took for gangs of laborers to haul all those blocks of stone from the quarries to the Nile, load them on boats, then haul them up from the Nile’s edge east of Giza and get them into place in the slowly rising mass of the Pyramid, and then to equate all that effort with the fantastic outpouring of force that flows through the turbines of a modern jet engine and keeps an airliner poised in the thin air 40,000 feet above the ground for the long flight from LA to Cairo.

This weeks’ Green Thought comes from John Michael Greer’s internet blog ‘The Archdruid Report’ (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Greer

 

Lyndon Johnson

This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through…..a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

 

This weeks green thought comes from US President Lyndon Johnson after scientists had explained the ‘greenhouse effect’ caused by the burning of fossil fuels to him in 1965. In February he then gave a ‘Special Message to Congress’ containing this message.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Johnson

http://www.nps.gov/features/malu/feat0002/wof/Lyndon_Johnson.htm

Thomas Cole - Essay on American Scenery

 ‘We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our ignorance and folly’

 

This weeks Green Thought comes from the 1835 ‘Essay on American Scenery’ by the american artist Thomas Cole [1801 – 1848],founder of the Hudson River School of art  known for its romantic yet realistic portrayal of American landscape and wilderness.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River_School