To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I — or does anyone else — have to destroy them.
At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
I never thought I would get so viccseral watching a nature show on TV. I’ve been around a lot of bad hombres tied to nature and animals — shark finning off Costa Rica, sea turtle butchering on St. Johns, cock fighting in Guatemala, dog fighting in Juarez, and a whole lot of on the scene newspaper report stuff — accident scenes, suicide scenes, murder scenes, and some bad stuff in Guatemala and Salvador in the 1980s.
But something about this scene I watched on my can in my little abode on the Oregon Coast, where, of course, I see birds strangulating on fishing line, whales once in a while washed up dying of starvation, and, well, before my veganism, I was tutored in the skills of bow hunting and gun shooting for animals.
I feel bad about killing a deer and a bear, a long time ago. Not my thing, and not tied to blood sport. However, I’ve been in huge confined animal feeding operations (before we were considered terrorists for taking notes and filming) and have been with two rabbis while they cut the throats of cows in their bizarre kosher ritual. I euthanized my own dogs when it was time for them to say sayonara.
A lot more in my meager 62 years, from Vietnamese butchering dogs to Arabs in Saudi Arabia garroting goats.
But just yesterday, watching passively (well, I was writing a poem, too, while on my keister) watching a nature show.
Words and images to define a moment during an animal show on the corrupt Netflix: Pathetic. Emotionally upsetting. Par for the course of human centrism. Sad. Bloody traumatizing. Sick. Insane. Inhumane. Bizarre.
Here, approaching Earth Day 2019, all I can say that this one animal’s fate now is rapidly approaching death by climate change, because of man’s/woman’s fossil fuel consumption and the impending sea ice melt: illustrative of all sorts of collapsing ecosystems, and collapsing mental states that will unfold rapidly as more species starve to death, disappear, suffer more and more inbreeding.
In the scheme of things, yeah, one animal species, quasi iconic in a humorous and comic way, no big deal dying off, compared to us, the big boys/girls on the block: chimpanzees with nuclear weapons. Yes, 11 million human infants dying worldwide each year from preventable and treatable gut issues, like diarrhea — because the rich and those “that have” get access to relatively clean potable water, while billions have to scoop up protozoa-laden water from ditches and fouled waterways. How much are those idiots raising for Notre Dame Cathedral? Billions for a symbol of rape, murder, theft, destruction? It’s a tourist spot, not some tangible place of intellectual or spiritual recompense. You think those billionaires and famous celebrities and the Holy See have the bucks to help put in clean water systems to stop 11 million babies dying yearly from preventable diseases? No way, Victor Hugo! It’s about the gargoyles, man. Billions for a fire-scarred church, while the US raped Iraq of antiquities, big time!
Are my readers already saying, “Dude, are you daft? Those people — churches, synagogues, billionaires, celebrities — don’t pay for helping black and brown people live, nor do they care their progeny bites the dust? The sooner their kids die, the better off for humanity and us, the elite, those elites are saying in their hearts of hearts, brother Paul.”
I’ll introduce what it is that’s getting me pissed off/down in the dumps and repeating in my mind, over and over, “I told you so this would be happening 50 years ago.”
First, though, an aside: What the precipitating factor today is to determine a person’s worth . . . what I have always said . . . should be the precipitants of our ire when considering the true colors of people – in most cases, how we should judge the so called elites/leaders/people with billions/militarists.
A singular action is enough to paint an entire person’s career and his or her value to the world, or lack of value. We know Obama did terrible harm to the world, but killing an American citizen and then his son in his Tough Guy Killer Drone Tuesdays says it all. Ike Eisenhower has all sorts of bad about him, but refusing to take Mami Till’s letter and failure to acknowledge the true civil rights platform of her son Emmett’s murder by redneck racists (and the entire system), well, that’s it for that Five Star dude in my book. Clinton and Gore dismantling our righteous and necessary social safety nets in their big Welfare Reform package, adding cops cops cops to the menu, well, that says it all for them, baby. Hillary believing and saying there are black children who are monsters, “super predators” as her white racist female self proclaimed, need we say more?
Then there are genocidal/ war criminal lovelies like Henry Kissinger and his Vietnam program. Need we say more about him other than he is a sub-human who should not be advising and helping make more killer policy and garnering millions in speaking and book fees? Colin Powell and his yellow cake lies, or his work in Vietnam trying to discredit the heroes who exposed the Mai Lai Massacre? What redeems these killers? Did they spend time in solitary decades, and receive rehabilitation in our rotten penal system? Which leaders like Churchill are there in history who have had laurels and money and position, status and power thrown at them for following these credos? A good Jap is a Dead Jap. A good Indian is a Dead Indian? Bomb them back to the stone age. Dead civilians or members of a wedding party are collateral damage. Bug splat. Worthy of not double-tapping but triple-tapping?
Judge, jury, and executioners all.
You get the picture. George Junior Bush helping the chemical industry save money (make profits) by not pushing specific markers in chemical poisons so ER doctors and first responders might have antidotes ready in case of a child or adult poisoning? Come on, folks, you let that go, and support anything by this Mengele?
Goes to the issue of perversions like Trump and Epstein, kidnapping or drugging teens for sex slaves. Hmm, give that boy, Trump, a pass on that? Even his Access Hollywood tapes, that’s just fine he can grab you mother’s, aunt’s, niece’s, sister’s, daughter’s, wife’s vaginas, gets away with it, and then that qualifies him to be prez – albeit boot licking president? You even consider voting for that perversion, well, what’s that say about YOU? Deplorables? Yes, yes!
They voted for Hillary and they voted for Trump. Deplorables all and one. Forty-two percent of USA eligible voters did not cast a ballot in 2016 for either perversion, and they/we are accused of putting Trump in POTUS office; accused of being the reason this country is so screwed up, failing, a pathetic excuse for a superpower?
Right, let’s blame Ralph Nader!
I disqualify any human perversion, especially those with power, money, bombs and inside leverage (as in political/bureaucratic/corporate), for any job involving public service or interacting with us, the citizens. For instance, Trump continued to call the Central Park Five guilty when they were found illegally, unethically and perversely prosecuted guilty for the rape of a jogger they had nothing to do with! Not a disqualifying response during the lead up of several presidential campaigns for a casino criminal, Trump the Prequel?
What disqualifies people or nations to be considered worthy of our compassion, understanding, respect or backing? We ever fix that Japanese internment problem here in USA or Canada? Hell, so-tragically-hip Spain can’t even acknowledge the rape, murder, torture of millions of people and the theft of heritage, culture, resources as a consequence of invading Mexico more than half a millennia ago?
“There were massacres and oppression,” AMLO says in the video. “The so-called conquest was fought with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the temples.” He then called on Spain to apologize for its role in the conquest, and to ask for forgiveness from Mexico’s indigenous peoples.
And what does pathetic ex-Empire Spain say in response? This country that for whatever sustainability they may have in the crumbling EU collective shows its colors. I wonder how many Iberians reject the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s with his wife to Centla—the Maya city whose ruins they stood among—commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the battle the Chontal Maya fought against the forces of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.
I was in many of those cities many times, including San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. The town was named after Bartolomé de las Casas, a Domincan friar, who wrote to the king and queen back then, about what he saw traveling through Spain’s colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean: from 1517 in 1540 in his book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. The friar detailed the systematic torture, rape, and mutilation the Spaniards exacted on indigenous people in every colony de las Casas visited.
Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches, Las Casas wrote.
— Bartolomé de las Casas
I won’t get in details how the Spanish government felt impugned by AMLO’s letter being published, and the letter AMLO got published in Spanish newspapers was directed to not just the Spanish government and people, but to the more perverse examples of humanity, the King and Royal Family.
So, I am going tangential again, but alas, here is what the leading edge of the points I am going to make about “you can judge a book by its cover, or people by their early deeds, beliefs, actions.” Or, some event or cataclysm in nature which I am about to explain is emblematic and illustrative of larger issues that are not always apparent in the Western mind, or our collective way of thinking.
I have been accused of more than just “exotic” thinking, or more so, surreal, stream of conscious, disconnected, disharmonious, almost fugue. Let me try here, below. First the quotes:
“This is the sad reality of climate change,” Sophie Lanfear, who led a documentary crew that recorded the behavior for Our Planet—Netflix’s big-budget answer to Planet Earth, told me. “They’d be on the ice if they could.”
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever filmed,” says Jamie McPherson, a cameraman, on a behind-the-scenes video.
Once at the top, they rested for a few days, and walked off only after the beaches below had emptied. Indeed, as the narration suggests, the sounds of their departing comrades may have lured the cliff-top [ones] off the edge. “They seemed to all want to return to the sea to feed as a group,” Lanfear says.
“It is not a normal event,” says Lanfear. “It’s such a tangible, obvious thing to show people. It’s clear as day.”
When these animals encounter hard surfaces, they rise up to meet them, hauling their two-ton bulks onto floating pieces of ice. When they fall, they flop off those low platforms into the accommodating water. So you might imagine that an [animal], peering off a tall cliff, doesn’t really understand what will happen to it when it steps off. It doesn’t expect to plummet for 260 feet, cartwheel through the air, bounce off the rocks, and crash abruptly.
Climb, plummet, cartwheel, bounce: These are not [these animals’] associated verbs.
Yes, so walruses amass in their haul outs to rest, but the ice is gone — no, this is not some bullshit Sean Hannity FOX thing make believe thing. The ice, my friends, is the big story of the century, of the millennia, yet, we have the new green deal for capitalists — wow, bullet trains, AOC announces. That’s as big of a scam as anything. We have collapsing ecosystems, entire meteorological systems, changing, the water cycle, clouds, and more and we will have Starbucks, Patagonia Clothing and Gear and Broadway and Bodegas.
Here it is, on Dissident Voice, by Howie:
Conversion to an ecologically sustainable and just economy cannot happen under the capitalist system. Capitalism’s competitive structure drives blind, relentless growth that is consuming and destroying the biosphere. Its competitive international structure breeds wars for resources, markets, cheap labor, and geopolitical military advantages. With the nuclear weapons of the nuclear powers on hair-trigger alert and a new nuclear arms race now underway, the capitalist system will annihilate us if we don’t replace it with an ecosocialist system first.
Or, by Robert at DV:
Sometime in the near future it is highly probable that the Arctic will no longer have sea ice, meaning zero ice for the first time in eons, aka: the Blue Ocean Event.
Surely, the world is not prepared for the consequences of such a historic event, which likely turns the world topsy-turvy, negatively impacting agriculture with gonzo weather patterns, thus forcing people to either starve or fight. But, the problem may be even bigger than shortages of food, as shall be discussed.
Watch the episode of the Attenborough show with hundreds of walruses falling to their deaths:
“It was like 100,000 Chewbaccas outside,” says Lanfear. “We could hear tusks scraping along the side of the walls. We could hear walruses snoring. We opened the door, and it was a wall of blubber.” The walruses gather “out of desperation, not out of choice,” David Attenborough says over the resulting footage. “A stampede can occur out of nowhere. Under these conditions, walruses are a danger to themselves.” And so they climb “to find space away from the crowds.”
Watch here — Entertainment?
Now, I caught an article in the Atlantic, that bad magazine of neoliberalism and false balance/false equivalency. This pathetic writer, this so pathetic writer, Ed Yong is also so flippant — “Climb, plummet, cartwheel, bounce: These are not walrus associated verbs.” What kind of shit is that?
In his piece, he gets some paid-off, middling person to say that the walruses climbing cliffs up to 260 feet high is not a result of climate disruption/chaos. First, reality in his piece:
But in recent years, Arctic sea ice has been thinner and sparser. The 2017–18 season marked a record low. As these icy platforms have retreated, walruses have increasingly been forced to haul out onto solid land—in the thousands.
These haul-outs aren’t new events, but they were once rarer, smaller, and less dangerous, according to Anatoly Kochnev, a Russian naturalist who has studied walruses for 36 years. When he started, only males gathered on these sites; now females and calves do too, and many are trampled in the scrum. When he started, haul-outs were rare in the northerly Chukchi Sea; now many sites there regularly heave with walruses.
It doesn’t matter how many naysayers old Yong can find to present a false equivalency in his piece. This is standard operating procedure for flaked out editors making a cool million a year or more on the East Coast working for these middling magazines. But Yong finds one. Here, again, university-preened, blatant Little Eichmanns, fit for Exxon public information officer fidelity:
But a few walrus scientists who saw the clip have questioned parts of this narrative—including the claim that walruses are climbing “to find space away from the crowds.” “Walruses thrive on crowds and haul out in tight groups, even when space is available,” says Lori Quakenbush from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Also, in the sequence, it looks as if the beach beneath the teetering walruses is relatively empty. What crowds are they escaping from?
This confusion arises from the ways in which documentaries elide space and time. Lanfear clarifies that the sequence includes footage from two separate beaches—one with the 100,000-strong congregation and one with the falls. At the latter, walruses started climbing only once the area beneath the cliffs had completely filled up; gregarious or not, they had no room. Once at the top, they rested for a few days, and walked off only after the beaches below had emptied. Indeed, as the narration suggests, the sounds of their departing comrades may have lured the cliff-top walruses off the edge. “They seemed to all want to return to the sea to feed as a group,” Lanfear says.
Oh, those “few walrus” scientists in their classrooms and labs. What the hell does that mean? And, what is a scientist tied to some university — that is now corporate funded to keep real science kettled and controlled — got to say anyway?
This is the tragedy of Earth Day 2019 — 49 years in the running. We have a society of incrementalists, those who have no idea how quickly the quickening will be, or already is. It’s both comical and suicidal. Baby steps for infantiles.
Earth Day, yeah. I just went to a cool talk in Newport given by an Oregon State University fellow who talked to our Oregon-based American Cetacean Society group. Dr. Bill Hanshumaker presented, “How do we know what we think we know about marine mammals?”
ID: Dr. William Hanshumaker, Fisheries and Wildlife Senior Instructor at Oregon State University and Oregon Sea Grant’s Chief Scientist
“Top Ten Organisms Coast Watchers Find on the Beach”
Beach visitors frequently call the Hatfield Marine Science Center or drop by with unknown artifacts with the need to have them identified. Bill Hanshumaker has been documenting this data for over 23 years. During his presentation Dr. Hanshumaker will share some of the most common and unusual findings. Bill has nearly 40 years of experience in Free-Choice Learning, working first at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry before joining OSU at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in 1993. He designs and evaluates educational programs for delivery through a variety of vehicles to a broad range of audiences. This includes developing exhibits and curriculum that meets state education standards. Since 2003, Bill has organized more than 50 special events or workshops that have reached over 25,000 individuals. His public necropsies of marine mammals, large fish, sea turtles or cephalopods are extremely popular.
Cool guy but he’s retiring at age 67. I am writing a piece about his talk to the ACS people, and, well, I try to insert a bit of a more radical narrative and line of questioning in the mix wherever I go. Way too many lock step older people not questioning war, capitalism or looking at the big picture. Like me, he was inspired and pushed to get into marine sciences while watching Jacques Cousteau’s Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau on ABC when he was a kid. I went into journalism, and blew that idea off getting a doctorate in marine biology. Some days, I think I fucked that opportunity to be a poor struggling artist! Ha.
What’s this fellow’s salary compared to the rot gut people at the university — coaches? Shit, so little compared to coaches — millions. This coach ranks 63 at Oregon State in the Pac-12, Jonathan Smith, $1,900,008, $1,275,000 — $3,075,060 , $4,037,517 — base pay and assistant pay, and buyout if he is fired!
These fellows are right-wing, hyper Christian and not educators. Coaches are pimps. On the other hand, scientists like Hanshumaker have done some amazing research, traveled to work on looking at whale and other marine mammal life, and teaches students and the public. He is worth a hell of a lot more than some football coach herding youth to get brain injuries!
But earth day, really with this climate change scenario after scenario bypassing the brains of CEOs and politicians, it is no easy thing to kumbaya together and pretend there is light at the end of the Capitalist Tunnel.
That spring, tens of thousands of walruses appeared at Point Lay, Alaska. Such haul-outs were once rare; now they’re an annual fixture, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says is “most likely” connected to global warming. Walruses, it seems, can no more resist the changing of the world than they can defy gravity.
Most likely, the operative words of careerists, little Eichmanns, people who are not movers or shakers and certainly are gutless. “Most likely,” the operative words of the 2020’s?
Recycling?
The only reason for having a 96-gallon recycling cart is to hold all those boxes and containers that consumable products come in. If mountains of unusable refuse are the necessary price of economic growth, we need to rethink the whole economy, starting with home economics. Reduce mail orders. Buy locally made products from local retailers and pay them with cash or checks. (They’ll thank you.) Choose and demand low-tech packaging, preferably plant-based, that can be recycled, downcycled, or composted. Bone up on which plastics can harm your health. Reuse empty containers that are hard to recycle to the extent it’s safe to do so. Walk, cycle, or take transit to the store and of course, don’t forget your shopping bags.
Try Waste 360 or Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: Facts and Figures
Cool dudes and dudettes, walruses:
Walruses may not be as fast or agile as their seal cousins, but apparently they can dive deeper than most. Even though diving prowess is high among “pinnipeds,” the family of semiaquatic mammals to which they belong, walruses were long thought to be one of the few members of this family incapable of diving deeper than 100 meters. But a new study provides evidence that they can, in fact, dive deeper than most seals and sea lions.
In 2010, scientists from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources traveled to the Arctic Circle to study the diving behavior of a group of Atlantic walruses living in the high Arctic. With the help of some local Inuit hunters, the researchers located 21 walruses and used harpoons to embed small satellite transmitters into their blubbery hides, which allowed them to monitor the movements of the walruses.
They spent the next three years monitoring the movements and foraging habits of these walruses, and according to their findings, which were published in February in the journal Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, they discovered that the walruses sometimes dove as deep as 500 meters. Of the 33 living species of pinnipeds, only 10 are known to dive deeper.
I’m thinking about Rex Tillerson and all the CEOs and advanced marketers and Little Eichmanns who have made money off of lying about global warming and fossil fuels. What a dream — having the top 50 richest men and women frog marched off those cliffs those walruses are falling from, largely because their eyesight is horrible out of water and they are hearing below walruses entering the water.
What a great big magical dream — all those militarists, kings and queens, politicians, presidents, old and new, dictators, the entire cadre of Mad Men and Mad Women whose jobs ares to not tell the truth, to obfuscate the truth, to bend it, to unlearn it — you know, the industry of agnotology. All of them pushed off those cliffs in Russia where these scenes of slipping off cliffs death are harrowing for even an old dude like me.
What don’t we know, and why don’t we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about “how we know” to ask: Why don’t we know what we don’t know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don’t want you to know (“Doubt is our product” is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.
Denialism, the new normal for capitalists, even those in the 80 percent, who are being abused and denigrated and economically/intellectually/spiritually/culturally/artistically/environmentally neutered by the elite!
Let’s not deny on Earth Day!