We’re probably not the first time there’s been a civilization in the universe,” states Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.
The idea that we’re destroying the planet gives us way too much credit. Certainly, we’re pushing the earth into a new era. If we look at the history of the biosphere, the history of life on earth, in the long run, the earth is just going to pick that up and do what is interesting for it. It will run new evolutionary experiments. We, on the other hand, may not be a part of that experiment. Source.
Damn, and I was just going to rattle on about why I am not making it to the Newport City Council meeting in an hour (6 pm, 4/15/2019) to see if the wise mayor and council vote for a single-use plastic bag ban. I have rallied around the ban for many more reasons than the negative effects of this throwaway bag on marine life, fish, reefs and the aesthetic value of not having a bag for groceries wafting high in the Sitka spruces around here.
I’m thinking a puny single-use plastic bag ban is the inch-worm step toward having a shitload of real conversations, action plans and paradigm shifts in how communities will attempt to weather the impending huge negative effects of climate change, food shortages, high cost of energy, pollution, lack of housing (affordable) and the lack of worthy employment, education, retirement, palliative care, and rehab.
If we can’t restrict one plastic item in the scheme of all the junk thrown at us by corporations and their chemical purveyors, then how are we going to have conversations about forcing all corporations to stop mindless over-production of junk and put an end to their Capitalism on Steroids of planned material-product obsolescence so they can continue to sell-sell-sell? How are we going to stop capitalism in its tracks, which is the ONLY solution to climate change, predatory wealth, and the resulting externalities of more and more pollution, toxins, wars, and death? That’s the only way to battle against what we have now, in 2019 as 410 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere continues to increase, ocean acidification continues to rise, and hypoxia and mindless-endless wars continue to spread; wars and war making/prepping/staging sucking an amazing 52 cents of each tax dollar thrown at war material/war profiteers/war enablers/ war side businesses?
Broken schools systems, broken lives, and broken spirits, in a country that calls itself Christian and then supports the most irreligious, blasphemous devil-loving man/woman/LBGTQ-hating, racist and sexist and imbalanced human shadow called Trump. All of those seven deadly sins he has dripping from his Big Mac lubricated jowl.
The reality is there is no simple approach to anything these days — to even getting to first base in regard to community participatory thinking in order to make way at rolling up our sleeves to begin to solve problem after problem created by that perverted business principle (sic) that any of the Fortune 1000 and all the sycophants embrace (all solvable). And the unintended and intended consequences of our individual, family, group and national/global decisions need to be weighed ahead of the game. The tipping points, the feedback loops, and lag time and tragedy of the commons and the overshoot of everything capitalism does for profit with no regard to humankind, wildlife, air, water, food, soil, aesthetics and so on, this is what we need to be working on, not all the flippant shit we express in our collective capitalist angst and superficial consumerism.
I am also colliding with some heady stuff, tied to the Great Filter, while teaching some dirt-poor children in this rural county and working on imbecilic plastic bag bans (when we should be banning all plastics and go back to a world where we do things in bulk — think reusable containers, streamlining packaging and working with the finite planet. These juxtapositions are the thing of my morning first cup of coffee:
Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should seek evidence of extraterrestrials, such as via signals, fossils, or astronomy. But contrary to common expectations, evidence of extraterrestrials is likely bad (though valuable) news. The easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.
[…]
Finally, we would do well to keep a in mind a few unusual aspects of this Great Filter puzzle. First, let us keep in mind the interdisciplinary nature of the this puzzle. While it may comforting for each discipline to claim that the Filter must surely lie in some other discipline of (in their eyes) lessor repute, such claims should surely be backed up by detailed analysis using our best understanding of that discipline. It will no more do for astronomers to simply claim, without further supporting analysis, that people will lose their tendency to colonize, than it would do for biologists to simply declare that astronomers could not possibly know that the universe is as big as they claim.
Second, we must be wary of the “God of the Gaps” phenomena, where miracles are attributed to whatever we don’t understand. Contrary to the famous drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost, here we are tempted to conclude that the keys must lie in whatever dark corners we have not searched, rather than face the unpleasant conclusion that the keys may be forever lost.
Finally, we should remember that the Great Filter is so very large that it is not enough to just find some improbable steps; they must be improbable enough. Even if life only evolves once per galaxy, that still leaves the problem of explaining the rest of the filter: why we haven’t seen an explosion arriving here from any other galaxies in our past universe? And if we can’t find the Great Filter in our past, we’ll have to fear it in our future. — Robin Hanson
How can we not question the scheme of things, big and small and unknown . . . and the observable now and the predictable future in our collective predictive consciousnesses? Really, though, the crux of this blog is about how quickly words become, now, in 2019, the tools of incarceration and damnation by the powers. Words that repeat themselves and end up on the precipice of propaganda time, with realities only set for the marketers, billionaires and political class. Just look now at Julian Assange. We are all Julian Assange! That is, those of us who write, we all are Assange. Those of us who publish. And who report!
The big question today and from hereon is: How might I end up erased or un-personed, because I espouse anti-Imperialism and anti-Americanism and anti-Capitalism ideals, or posit a much more aggressive revolutionary zealotry or even ask for people to face fascism with chaos/disruption/ physical force against the powers that be. Rejecting to jobs, rejecting payments, fines, levies, fees, prosecutions, mortgages, indoctrination, taxes, mandates, tolls; or invalidating popular propaganda and its evil twin, marketing, well, that in itself is violence against the state, the corporation, the old-new global or community or group order.
The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sow the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast. — John Pilger
Now, this mental state I am shaking out of is tied to the big picture/small picture thing, and while the plastic bag ban I have written about here recently in the past, and those few little bits that have been published in the local newspaper, well well, life does go on in terms of the big big scale!
Experts Paint Sobering Potential for Sea Change
No Ordinary Fish Monger — page 1
Students Grapple with Plastics — page 4
This is how democracy doesn’t work — going to a small town city council, rural county locale, trying to wade through the ineptitude of our representative government. Many in the city councils around the country get paid squat. Many are using it — political service/disservice — to make connections, both business and political, which is the same Hydra in fact. Much on that later, too! Many small town council members are attempting to do some good for the community, don’t get me wrong. But the solutions are still mired in the fantasies of economic growth unchecked, a green light to the business community, and a belief that everyone in the USA can pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps and find his or her 40 acres and a mule — or in modern parlance, his or her own 2500 square foot rancher on 1.5 acres with 2.3 children and 2.7 vehicles in the 3 car garage while managing a string of drive-through coffee stands! Or variations on that theme!
Environmental concerns are just postcard thinking by the masses, that majority of people who have not yet suffered the fence-line communities’ environmental (pollution) racism.
Q. What are some people that inspire you?
A. The work of W E B Dubois has inspired me a lot. He was not only a famous sociologist but also someone who could be called a ‘change agent’. He was not only a good social theorist but also very interested in the application of his work. I saw his work to be directly relevant to influencing the life of ordinary people. His work made me believe that research, policy, and practice must go hand-in-hand.
Q. How is climate change a social and environmental justice issue?
A. Climate change is the number one problem of the 21st century. We sometimes forget that climate change is much more than simply parts per million (of greenhouse gas emissions). It is an equity issue. It effects some people directly. The most peculiar aspect of climate change is that the populations that contribute least to the problem of climate change are most likely to feel its impacts. Such disproportionality makes it a serious social justice issue.
Climate change is also a very complex issue to solve. It is a global issue, a national issue, and a local issue—all at the same time. At the local level, the population at the front line of the impacts of climate change are also at risk to other things. For example, usually the most susceptible to climate change-related impacts are those with greater food and water insecurity.
Hence, climate change intersects with vulnerable populations not only after a disaster but also before a disaster. Because of the complexity and uniqueness of the climate change crisis, we cannot continue to plan (climate mitigation and adaptation) for it using the tools of the past. I think that from a planning perspective, we cannot assume that a uniform plan can work for all in terms of ensuring social justice. Planning has to be sensitive to the fact that communities and nations have different levels of wealth, health, and education. The goal for planning should be to build community resilience and provide an opportunity for people to bounce back both before and after a catastrophic event. — Robert D. Bullard, the Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. He is often described as the father of environmental justice.
Look, I cut my teeth on environmentalism, and yes, we have disaster after disaster happening to ecosystems — wild, as in marine, and with homo sapiens, as in the average Joe and Jane, Lupe and Lorenzo! I put the human element in with the wild element, and, yes, there are huge issues tied to capitalism, population at 7.5 billion, corporate complicity (and its driving of other sell-outs and Faustian Bargain adherents) in driving the ecological crisis. There is no argument from me to say that the 2,700 billionaires (and their families) and the 36,000,000 millionaires (and their families) do not deserve the power they have buggered the world for nor the majority of their loot because it’s been at the expense of families, men and women and children, and entire communities, entire regions, entire countries, entire species. If I say lock them up, then, well, what a better solution than what the 36,002,700 super rich and their thugs and sycophants and Little Big Eichmann’s have had in store for us, the 80 percent, and the ecosystems destroyed by each and every cargo ship unleashed to the world.
But, we also are a rapacious species, self-deluded into thinking we are above the rest of the animal kingdom, and that it’s winner takes all. That attitude is not the attitude of the majority of peoples. Yet, those people, those civil societies, those battlers for agriculture and water rights — to hold their land as bio-intensive and organic components of the ecosystems around them — they are battling overlords and societies that depend on perpetual growth: perpetual growth in profits, in interest rates, in population rates and replacement rates for each passing generation.
The unborn and the old and the ones who want to stay poor but completely able and subsistence centered on their own land can’t even get past the evil of the corporation and the government unregulators working with the thugs:
Glyphosate is the base chemical component for some 750 different brands of pesticides worldwide, in addition to Monsanto-Bayer’s Roundup. Glyphosate residues have been found in tap water, orange juice, children’s urine, breast milk, chips, snacks, beer, wine, cereals, eggs, oatmeal, wheat products, and most conventional foods tested. It’s everywhere, in brief.
In a long-term animal study by French scientists under Gilles Eric Seralini, Michael Antoniou and associates, it was demonstrated that even ultra-low levels of glyphosate herbicides cause non-alcoholic liver disease. The levels the rats were exposed to, per kg of body weight, were far lower than what is allowed in our food supply. According to the Mayo Clinic, today, after four decades or more pervasive use of glyphosate pesticides, 100 million, or 1 out of 3 Americans now have liver disease. These diagnoses are in some as young as 8 years old. (read old interview of great scientist exposing GMOs and Monsanto, who is now deceased, conducted by yours truly here!)
I always feel as if a little bit of hope can creep up on me and assist me in my own sanity in the insanity that is now. Sure, everything that changes stays the same. Maybe, but much on that later. The fact this glyphosate story is just one of millions demonstrating there is no great filter running this society, though many believe we as a species will eventually get to speeds approaching FTL — faster than light — to help us explore, move away, become celestial pilgrims again and again!
Hope is like knowing sugar is bad-bad-bad for you, for the entire human physiology, the entire system of the homo sapiens regulating immune system, creating inflammation, gut issues, brain “fog,” and more. Not glucose for the body as the body breaks down veggie and fruit fructose to feed the brain.
Yet, we go out and eat a Reese’s peanut butter cup or down a soda or shot of whiskey. It’s all bad-bad-bad, but we have hope that just one scoop of Ben and Jerry’s or one margarita or that Lucky Charms binge is just a passing phase.
Wrong! Addiction and feedback loops and hungry insulin rushing through the body looking to eat. And, alas, comes the single-use plastic bag ban. We want those reusable ones, those cotton ones, and, well, the bag ban — single use ones, that is (actually the single use wimpy bags are used as garbage liners and poop scoop receptacles, so they are actually disposable bags with a second use-reuse-repurpose tag) — seems like a win-win.
But, there are life cycle assessments, and the jury is pretty much in, out there — you have to look at the consequences of one action creating another action or one product taken out of the consumer stream but replaced by other products.
Life cycle assessments and embedded energy . . . and that fact that when you chew that mango on the Oregon Coast, consider how many miles it traveled from where it came; how many machines sowed it and harvested it; how many pesticides and inputs “protected” it and grew it; how much oil was used to build the transportation system that moved it and all the equipment to grow and harvest it; and how many more miles were expended to take it from point a to point b, and then to points c and d, as well as how much packaging after processing was used to bring that mango to you at the local 7-11 as dried sulfur-gassed chews ready to be trucked to the vendor selling them at the beach kiosk?
Life cycle analysis. Maybe we need to do the same life cycle (destroying) analysis of products. Or the life cycle enslavement cycle of freaky thinker like Mister 9-9-6 man or Elon Musk!
One of China’s richest men has been criticized for endorsing the controversial culture of 12-hour workdays in the country’s red-hot tech industry, saying employees who worked longer hours will get the “rewards of hard work.”
Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA), has spoken out on social media in recent days in support of the Chinese work practice known as “996.” The number refers to working from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week and is said to be common among the country’s big technology companies and start-ups.“If we find things we like, 996 is not a problem,” Ma said in a blog post Sunday on Chinese social media site Weibo. “If you don’t like [your work], every minute is torture,” he added.
Ma’s comments prompted criticism from Chinese social media users.
“Did you ever think about the elderly at home who need care, (or) the children who need company?” wrote a Weibo user with the online moniker stupidcan123, in response to Ma’s post. “If all enterprises enforce a 996 schedule, no one will have children” because of a lack of time, they added
“It has become harder and harder to raise money recently,” Zhao said in his brightly decorated office located in a fancy Beijing office building. “I’m under a lot of pressure. Sometimes I’m awake from around 2 am to dawn and can’t stop thinking about my company’s future.”
Eric Tao, founder and chief executive of Beijing-based random video chat company Holla, feels the same pain as Musk and Zhao. “As CEO of the company, I can’t under-perform this week and make it up by outperforming next week. It doesn’t work that way,” he said, adding that he works about 12 hours a day, so not as many as Musk.
In the scheme of things, 996 or 797 — 7 am to 9 pm 7 days a week — is what will (is) burning up the planet. Busy bees, these slave masters are. What are their billions made doing for society.
I know I know — a plastic bag ban is a drop in the proverbial pond.
I sent this email below to the mayor and council to circumvent going to a meeting an hour away (one-way) from where I live. Also, to circumvent the hard stares directed at me, as I am the only one who doesn’t stand for the pledge of allegiance and I am one of the few who doesn’t take off my hat for councils and judges, inside or outside. I am not afraid to visibly emote or enunciate my concerns when I hear something said. You know, I also do not like the constraints of gaveling fools looking down on us and three-minute time minutes for public comments per citizen.
I also do not see the plastic bag ban as a win-win, since we have allowed the plastics and toxins and oil industries and other industries to dictate what we do, think, believe, purchase and invest in . . . with the dirty bidding of the elected officials behold to them.
Date: Monday, April 15, 2019 – 6:00 PM
TO: Council Chambers, Newport City Hall, 169 SW Coast Highway
Dear Council –
First, I have to say our form of shallow participatory democracy is not working when we have to spend so much time on a simple single-use plastic bag ban.
This may be an elected form of representational democracy, but the reality is you all do not have the collective IQ to drill down on much. We the people, for the people, by the people actually should be working daily and at night to determine how communities thrive, or survive or mitigate what many scientists and journalists like myself call the privatization of the external negative costs to the community, including air, water, soil, ecosystems, human and non-human health.
Corporations reap the profits but we the taxpayer and the tens of thousands of human communities and the ecological ones to boot pay for the clean-up and negative outcomes of rapacious capitalism.
Our collective IQ exponentially outshines those collectively of all the CEOs of those companies like Exxon or Georgia Pacific or Weyerhaeuser or Raytheon or Google or Wells Fargo, et al. The problem is in places like Newport, where livable jobs are scarce for the average person working in service jobs and warehouse and blue collar employment, families sometimes have to have five jobs between both parents to make ends meet.
Coming to City Hall for a Council meeting is both difficult and disconnected to their lives.
So, back to not just a low hanging fruit, one that is right there between your feet:
The average bag you pick up at the grocery store, or carry your takeout in, has a lifespan of about 12 minutes.
When discarded, they clog sewage and storm drains, entangle and kill an estimated 100,000 marine mammals every year, and degenerate into toxic microplastics that fester in our oceans and landfills for up to 1,000 years.
Despite this, shoppers collectively use around 1 trillion billion single-use plastic bags every year. That’s 300 bags per person, per year, for every single person on Earth — or enough to circle the globe 8,600 times.
One trillion plastic bags – single use – are used, equating to 2 million per minute.
Now how is the average child from a family of parents barely getting to each new paycheck before an eviction or foreclosure notice going to wrap their heads around JUST single-use plastic bag consumption?
How will we have conversations about the incredible and perverse ways corporations have fed them and their parents on habitual overuse of plastics in everything?
A bag ban is a micro-start to the bigger conversations around ocean acidification (CO2 release from fossil fuels – plastics are fossil fuels – cement factories, cutting down and burning forests) and fisheries depletion and microplastics inside their own children’s gut, blood and feces.
We are the throwaway society we all embrace and decry because corporations profit from that lack of durability.
The ban is just a small start to the conversation which we need to start attacking the external pain and pollution and quickening of global warming we have to have now. Do we change our habits significantly when we have almost no choice in the matter since corporations control legislatures, federal agencies, local communities’ will and will power and narratives?
No, we have to demand a new system of production, resource exploitation, and citizen consumption.
Good luck tonight. LCA’s are deeper ways to look at all our consumption habits and the goods and services we demand as a very consumerist-centered society. That’s life-cycle assessments!
This is no small matter. You all are lowly representatives of the small city of Newport who will have to deal with these facts when looking at other plastics and other products used in the city. Life-cycle assessments and embedded energy and the amount of calories of energy (fossil fuel burning) to get food from farm to plate are big issues you might not think affect city council business but they will!
Vote for the plastic bag ban, but then be ready for bigger fish to fry, to use a pun that is probably not so funny these days.
I teach youth here in the Lincoln County school district. I write social-cultural-environmental-economic-media justice issues.
I continue to study (and was a leader in) true sustainability discourse, planning and education.
While I support the plastic bag ban, I am smart enough to look at the leakage of bans toward other uses of plastic to make up the bin and garbage can liner issue — yes, more plastic bags of heavier gauge will be purchased to offset that 12-minute single use bag.
Ponder how complicated the world is now that we have given the rights to clear-cut forests, dump toxins in river systems, emit pollutants in small and large communities’ air systems, and limit affordable housing to the purveyors of profit without social-environmental-cultural-racial considerations.
Even knowing all of the so-called ins and outs and positives and negatives tied to a city-wide ban on single use plastic bags, we have to show some mettle and begin to start the larger conversations on how what we get from corporations actually determines our futures and the futures of more than just seven generations out – about 140 years into the future!
Not easy reading:Bag leakage: The effect of disposable carryout bag regulations on unregulated bags/i.e. Life Cycle Analysis of Single Use Plastic Bags.
Sincerely, Paul Haeder, Otis, Oregon –
P.S. — committed to not adding to the road congestion and air pollution of my round-trip to Newport even in my 46 mpg 20 year old car by staying put this evening! (ahh, even knowing the energy footprint of typing on a computer and using an email system is significant unto itself!)
Here’s the leakage:
This means that 28.5 percent of the plastic reduction from DCB policies is lost due to consumption shifting towards unregulated trash bags. The results also provide a lower bound for the reuse of plastic carryout bags, with 12–22% of plastic carryout bags reused as trash bags pre-regulation. In other words, a substantial proportion of carryout bags were already reused in a way that avoided the manufacture and purchase of another plastic bag.
If carbon footprint was the only metric of environmental success, the results in this paper suggest DCB policies are having an adverse effect, especially if we consider the effect on paper carryout bag use. However, if the unmeasured benefits with respect to marine debris, toxicity, and wildlife are great enough, they could outweigh the greenhouse gas costs.
LCAs of plastic, paper, and reusable carryout bags have been shown to be sensitive to assumptions made about the weight and number of trash bags displaced by the secondary use of plastic carryout bag, with the reuse of plastic carryout bags as bin liners substantially improving their environmental performance (Mattila et al., 2011). According to a UK Environmental Agency (2011) study, a shopper needs to reuse a cotton carryout bag 131 times to have the same global warming potential (measured in kilograms of CO2 equivalent) as plastic carryout bags with zero reuse, while that same cotton bag needs to be reused 327 times if all plastic carryout bags are reused as bin liners.
And, of course, plastic bags are a major threat:
The United Nations Environmental Programme (2014) estimates the environmental damage to marine ecosystems of plastic litter is $13 billion per year. This estimate includes financial losses incurred by fisheries and tourism as well as time spent cleaning up beaches. While plastic bags and films represent only 2.2% of the total waste stream (CA Senate Rules Committee, 2014), plastic carryout bags and other plastic bags are the eighth and sixth most common item found in coastal cleanups. Once in waterways, plastic bags do not biodegrade, but instead break into smaller pieces, which can be consumed by fish, turtles, and whales that mistake them for food. A survey of experts, representing 19 fields of study, rank plastic bags and plastic utensils as the fourth severest threat to sea turtles, birds, and marine animals in terms of entanglement, ingestions, and contamination (Wilcox et al., 2016).
I’ll be posting an earth day, Earth Day, article soon, since that’s 4/22/2019. All the intricacies of just how screwed the planet it and how screwed 80 percent of us are in the immediate future. Screwed if we continue business as usual and coming up with the same asinine solutions to solve bigger and more complex problems —
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
So minor good news is that Newport, on a vote of 5 to 2, passed the plastic bag ban!
NEWPORT — The City of Newport became the eighth city in Oregon Monday night to pass a plastic bag ban ordinance, outlawing single-use plastic bags often used at grocery stores and community events to carry out purchases. The council vote was 5-2 in favor.