Oceans/Seas

Telephone Road in Houston, August 27, 2017, during Hurricane Harvey floods (Credit: Thomas B. Shea for AFP-Getty)

Is Harvey a force of nature or something more?
Clearly, Harvey is a natural disaster of monstrous proportions. Its destructiveness is the hottest topic on TV coast-to-coast and around the world. Still, cynics of climate change say natural disasters, like hurricanes, are normal and nothing more than nature’s way. The evidence, however, points in another direction; climate change is no longer simply nature doing its thing. It’s lost purity of the force of nature, only nature.

What a colourful run this outfit has had. Branded in 2013 by Judge Alex Kozinski of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit as pirates, the Sea Shepherd crew will be hanging up their hooks while rethinking their whale protection strategy.  Their long designated enemy, the Japanese whaling fleet, will be given some respite this hunting season.

This is the first of a planned series of articles to be gathered under the umbrella title “War Must and Can Be Ended.” All of the pieces will be based on weekly writing assignments I completed as a participant in a spring, 2017 online study course conducted by World Beyond War, a U.S.-based global activist organization pursuing the ultimate goal of an internationally binding abolition of war.
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Bluefin tuna at 3%, that’s it!
Pacific bluefin tuna has unique worldwide status as one of the most awe-inspiring remarkable creatures on the planet. They grow to 12 feet and 1,500 pounds and live up to 35 years whilst swimming super-fast, crossing the entire ocean in 21 days. They are the essence of nature’s wonderful creativity and beauty.

In the next few decades we’ll be driving species to extinction a thousand times faster than we should be.
— Dr. Stuart Pimm, conservation ecologist, Duke University.
It is quite possible that the baby boomer generation is the most impactful generation that this planet has ever seen.
— Racing Extinction directed by Louie Psihoyos, Discovery Channel, 2015.)

Sometimes when I’m kneeling on the outermost rocks in my favorite cove in Big Sur, the spray hitting me in the face and the endlessly popping champagne stallions rearing up on both sides of the cliffs, I feel one with this powerful dynamic being called Earth. I understand that, though I will disappear, it has been a great privilege to have been here. The Earth will go on, regenerate, prevail. If necessary, it will shake off the “disease” of humanity, as my favorite movie hero, Agent Smith of The Matrix, called us.

Plastic is not recycled.
One of the great myths of modern-day society is that people recycle in earnest… saving the environment. Au contraire! Check out the ocean. It’s filled with plastic. Fish and seabirds eat it by gobs and gobs. Furthermore, according to a World Economic Forum presentation, The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics, February 2016, by 2050 there will likely be more plastic than fish in the seas, unless socio-economic policies change drastically. But, where’s the leadership?

Human Evolution of the Mind Is Like a Hind Teat on a Texas Bull…

Now that the Great Acceleration dictates the biosphere with ever more and more intensity, sudden changes in the ecosystem are causing climate scientists to stop and ponder what’s happening to our planet, alike never before… hmm!
The Great Acceleration: “Only after 1945 did human actions become genuine driving forces behind crucial Earth systems.”1