What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now -- assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious -- and...
I entered engineering school at Columbia University in September of last year intent on pursuing my interest in the development of alternative energy technology. Throughout this past year, my classmates and I have been often reminded of how engineers are really public servants whose ideas, inventions, and discoveries can be powerful agents of change if the engineer is committed to them. The...
Mora County, N.M., has a message for the oil and gas industry: “You’re not welcome here.” County commissioners voted 2-1 on Monday to ban all oil and gas extraction in their drought-ravaged county near Santa Fe, home to fewer than 5,000 people . A temporary drilling moratorium is already in place in neighboring San Miguel County, but it is believed that Mora County is...
How to reduce one’s Carbon Footprint! The choice facing humanity is described in stark terms in a prize-winning book on environment called ‘Collapse’. In this book, the author Jared Diamond describes that one way or another, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved within a generation. “The only question is whether they will be resolved in...
Yesterday, after 21 months in federal custody, climate activist Tim DeChristopher approached the pulpit at his church in Salt Lake City, Utah, as a free man. The First Unitarian congregation rose in uproarious applause, tears streaming down more than a few faces. “It’s good to be home,” DeChristopher told the crowd. During his sermon, he said that he had never expected to...
(1)Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind - driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm...
There are over 7 billion people on this planet; (1,2) * 3 billion are living below the poverty line (less than $2US a day) * 1 billion are starving * 1% of the population own 40% of global assets * The richest 10% of individuals account for 85% of the world’s total assets * An estimated 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. That’s one child every 3...
Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? The Matrix Just imagine having no choice but to undergo a mental and spiritual reconfiguration process, having to update your internal belief and operational faculties due to being privy to new...
Clearly, we have a catastrophic problem on our hands. But climate change isn’t it. In fact, climate change isn’t a problem at all – to be precise, climate change is merely a very acute symptom of a much, much larger matrix of problems that, if left undiagnosed, will rapidly lead to limitless, albeit unnecessary, suffering for every living creature on the planet...
In the spirit of the popular Wall of Films we created back in 2012, we wanted to roll out a series of visual walls each crafted around a unique theme. Our first is dedicated to the rights of mother Earth and all our relatives. Check it out here: http://www.filmsforaction.org/wall-of-animal-rights/ Below are 20 of our favorite animal rights documentaries and short films in list...
Global warming is a threat to all of us regardless of our politics, religion, or culture. People from all walks of life are realizing this and converging to address this common threat and 350.org , Bill McKibben, along with The Sierra Club are leading the charge. "At 12 Noon on Sunday, February 17, thousands of Americans will head to Washington, D.C. to make Forward on Climate the...
A team of three passionate environmental filmmakers recently returned from the Amazon and Choco´ rainforests of Ecuador, beginning their journey to make a documentary featuring the best ways to save tropical rainforests. During the month of February, Earth Soul Productions is turning to Kickstarter, a "crowd-funding" website, to raise funds to cover the expenses of documenting...
Idle No More is an indigenous peoples movement born in Canada. Their mission is described as follows: Idle No More calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage to the land and water. We must repair these violations, live the spirit...
Discussions on energy in general are relevant for two reasons: first, most of us not only just use energy but we also recognise its absolutely indispensable role to allow us to function in our routines, assure the continuation of the economic systems we rely upon, and to put simply to allow for the survival of mankind; second, we finally have come to accept that energy sources and supply...
From elephant to estuary: does the 2013 European Green Capital have something to teach US cities?
It looks like the Japanese whaling fleet is ready to rumble. They fired their opening shot today by having the United States 9 th District Court issue an injunction against Sea Shepherd and Captain Paul Watson, specifically. The court order was a single page e-mail granting the injunction despite the fact that the preliminary injunction was denied in February 2012 by Judge Richard Jones...
I first met nature writer and philosophy professor Kathleen Dean Moore in 2004. I had already dog-eared my copy of her first collection of essays, Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water , when she came through town to read from her next book, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World . After the reading I stayed so long asking questions that she invited me to join her philosophy...
Sea Shepherd Makes Bid to China to Survey Diaoyu Islands to Protect Indigenous Marine Wildlife Japanese fishermen driving a pod of Risso's dolphins off the coast of Taiji Photo: Sea Shepherd It would be a tragedy to marine life to allow Japan to continue to control the Senkaku Diaoyu Tiaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. In light of the ongoing slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan and...
Beach Cleanup in Petitenget Beach Cleanup in Petitenget For those of you that have been to Bali, you know it's a beautiful island with a dirty little secret. Lots of trash. When I arrived in Bali in Novembe
My ecological journey started in the forests of the Himalaya. My father was a forest conservator, and my mother became a farmer after fleeing the tragic partition of India and Pakistan. It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology. The songs and poems our mother composed for us were about trees, forests, and India’s forest...
For the past eight years the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) led by Captain Paul Watson has prosecuted its anti-whaling campaigns in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary near Antarctica and disrupted the annual Japanese whaling hunt. This year another ship is being added to the expanding Sea Shepherd fleet, the SSS Sam Simon , named after The Simpsons co-creator whose...
Utah State University presented a first-of-its-kind electric bus that is charged through wireless charging technology in a demonstration Nov. 15. Image source: Utah State University
Device Uses Solar Energy to Convert Carbon Dioxide into Fuel April 17, 2007 By Sherry Seethaler CO2 splitting semiconductor/catalyst device under construction (gallium phosphide wafer with metal contacts) Credit: Aaron Sathrum, UCSD Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have demonstrated the feasibility of exploiting sunlight to transform a greenhouse gas into a useful product.
' One woe doth tread upon another's heel, So fast they follow ". That radical green pressure group PriceWaterhouseCoopers warns that even if the present rate of global decarbonisation were to double, we would still be on course for 6C of warming by the end of the century. Confining the rise to 2C requires a sixfold reduction in carbon intensity: far beyond the scope of current policies. A...
It was a dreary late- September morning in the East Texas woods outside of Winnsboro, chill and drizzly. Everything was wet or damp except for the spirits of four young people sitting in a tree stand. They were perched 30 feet above the path of the Keystone XL pipeline, slated to carry very heavy and very toxic Canadian tar sands bitumen from Cushing, Okla., to refineries in Houston. The...
BREAKING UPDATE 5:15PM: According to blockaders on the ground, several arrests have been made at the Tree Blockade. We are awaiting details but it has been confirmed two tree-sitters have been arrested. Monday I was arrested at the site of Tar Sands Blockade’s tree blockade in Winnsboro, TX. Though some people attend an action of that size with the intention of being arrested...
Oil and gas drilling operations are already well underway in twelve national parks, and that number may soon balloon to 42 if the fossil fuel companies get their way. The progressive mainstay Center for American Progress recently requested data from the National Park Service regarding current and future drilling operations. The agency complied—it outlined 42 national park sites where...
Five million people die every year as a result of the carbon economy and the impacts of climate change, according to the latest edition of DARA’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor. Published today, the report warns this could rise to six million by 2030, with 700,000 of those deaths from climate change related impacts. It estimates 100 million people could die as a result of climate-carbon...
Did you ever stop to consider that the wild and hairy anarchists of the Earth First! Movement are really just a bunch of death cult Illuminati in cahoots with big government, Time magazine, the Shriners and um, aliens and lizard people and shit? Yeah, we didn’t either. But now, after watching this video “Earth First! Death Cult” from Infowars.com, an Alex Jones...
Rice. It’s just one of the basics, right? Whether eaten on its own, or in products like pastas or cereal, this inexpensive and healthy food is a staple for Asian and Latino communities, as well as the growing number of people looking to avoid gluten. Here’s the bad news (cue Debbie Downer sound effect ): The food most of us think we have more or less locked down is shockingly...
It speaks the language of riffles and babbles, not legal rights and codes, but the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third largest, has received something no other river in the country – and possibly the world – yet has: a legal voice. In a framework agreement signed last week between the Crown and the Whanganui River iwi (the local Maori people), the river will be...
New Orleans, LA - "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either." Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen...
Over many years as an activist, attorney and artist working on environmental campaigns, Chris Desser began to wonder about the sensual pleasures that will disappear from our lives as more and more species go extinct. That was the genesis of her “Catalog of Extinct Experience”— a multimedia installation at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center planned for the Fall of 2013...
One of the world's biggest environmental crimes has been more or less forgotten. This is part of our collective guilt as the world's ecosystem continues its accelerated collapse. But the new documentary film The Big Fix takes a detailed, daring look at what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with BP's Macondo offshore oil drilling rig. The story and facts that emerge are more than disturbing...
While much has been made of the $535 million loan guarantee made to the failed Solyndra Corporation in 2009 to encourage alternative energy, you may have missed the court decision this week, halting expansion plans for a Kansas coal plant facing similar problems. The ruling underscores how deadbeat coal plants can be even more costly for taxpayers. Back in 1980, Sunflower Generation...
REMIX : To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new. If you’ve seen it, you’ll probably have guessed that here at The Crisis of Civilization we love Remix films – and we want you to have a go too. We would like to invite you to create your own Crisis of Civilization -style sequences, using unused interview audio of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed with images...
Since 1997, the biggest shopping day of the year in North America has also been known as Buy Nothing Day - a playful protest against the cultural and commercial pressures that compel us to consume more every year, grow more in debt to prove our love to our loved ones and find temporary happiness in that euphoric moment of purchase. It's a movement that has been growing internationally...
I wrote this originally in 2010, and, it is based on decades of work by some of our best. Our scientists do not get credence from media. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/publications/annrpt25/Manning.pdf This document is pages 121 to 126 of a longer set of data about our monitoring of our Homeworld, and specifically, the composition of our air, or, atmosphere. Unlike the countless tens and...
Residents from 10 Bidayuh villagers this week set fire to five logging camps and thirteen heavy machines in a stark protest against logging activities on their land, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. As reported by Free Malaysia Today , the Bidayuh villagers took matters into their own hands because of the governments refusal to address their complaints about logging activities within...
Frack! tells the story of the unconventional gas-drilling ("fracking") frenzy sweeping the Marcellus region, including the Catskills and Upper Delaware River watershed, threatening pristine areas which provide clean drinking water for over 15 million people. Without a massive public outcry, once idyllic rural landscapes could become toxic industrial wastelands, and New York State a gas...
Very, very few people can ever say that they are in the single most important place they could possibly be, doing the single most important thing they could possibly be doing -- that's you, here, now. You are the movement that we need if we are going to win in the few years that we have. You have the skills now, you are making the connections, and there is no one else. It is you. That is a...
March 14, 2011 (1400 hrs) - Watching scenes of the devastation is emotionally taxing. Bodies continue to be found everywhere. The body count in Miyagi Prefecture alone is now over 10,000. Whole towns completely wiped off the map. Even if people escaped with their lives, those lives are now shattered. And now it looks as though the 20-year slow-motion collapse of Japan’s economy could be...
“Every child,” wrote pioneer botanist Luther Burbank, “should have mud pies, grasshoppers, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pinecones, rocks to roll, snakes, huckleberries and hornets. And any child who has been deprived of...
The Honeywell complex in Kansas City owned by the General Service Administration (GSA) and regulated by the NNSA is a toxic waste dump. Instead of holding the corporations liable for the mess they have created the EPA has created a program referred to as a Superfund. The EPA states: Superfund is the federal government’s program to clean up the nation’s uncontrolled hazardous waste...
Kansas City, Thursday March 1, 2011 a group of concerned citizens gathered at the Cherith Brook Community House ( A Catholic Worker House ) to educate and plan protests against the building of nuclear warheads in Kansas City. Dorothy Day was the matriarch of an anarchist movement in the earlier part of the twentieth century. She began what is known as the catholic worker movement. The...
It's been a long time coming. Now it's final. Lisa Jackson and the EPA have gone to the mountaintop and announced their veto of the largest mountaintop removal mining permit in Appalachia. "This ushers in a new era of civility in the coalfields," said long-time coalfields justice leader Bo Webb. He added: "I think Judy Bonds just sent us all a little smile," referring to the recent...
An internal EPA memo released Wednesday confirms that the very agency charged with protecting the environment is ignoring the warnings of its own scientists about clothianidin, a pesticide from which the German agrichemical giant, Bayer racked up about $262 million in sales in 2009. Clothianidin has been widely used on corn, the largest U.S. crop, since 2003. Suppliers sell seeds...
Reducing your home energy use is the best of win-win deals — not only does it reduce your carbon footprint, it also saves you big bucks on your energy bills. That’s especially exciting when you consider that many home energy improvements are fast, easy and inexpensive . Often, the savings from an individual project are small, but when you start putting them together they add up...