Archive for the 'Species Extinction' Category

Aug 05 2007

Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys: The Case For Resilience

Published by cyrano2 under Raping the Earth, Species Extinction, Environment, Corporatism

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

honeybee3

By Chip Ward

7/30/07

Resilience. You may not have heard much about it, but brace yourself. You’re going to hear that word a lot in the future. It is what we have too little of as our world slips into unpredictable climate chaos. “Resilience thinking,” the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace “efficiency” as the organizing principle of our economy.

Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That’s what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one “best” way of doing something — usually “best” means most profitable over the short run — and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible — things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We’re skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.

Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one “best” way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.

In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.

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Jul 11 2007

WHAT TO DO? WHAT TO DO? Taking Action In The Face Of Collapse

Published by cyrano2 under Economic Collapse, Collapse of Civilization, Spiritual Awakening, Species Extinction, Environment

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to both the most recent offerings and to timeless classics available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

thinker1

By Carolyn Baker

Speaking Truth to Power

7/11/07

Every time I write an article on collapse such as my most recent one “Happy Independence Day; You Have No Government”, I am bombarded with emails asking me “what should I do?” For those who have just discovered this site, that is a legitimate question because for them, the reality of collapse may be new. Those who have been following this site for some time have heard many suggestions on what to do, but this article will offer those and other suggestions again more clearly and more adamantly than they have been offered here before. The intensity you are likely to hear in this piece is driven by the urgency which I and many of my peers are feeling at this moment. Quite frankly, it’s time to quit screwing around with talking about collapse and start acting. The Rubicon has been crossed, we’re not living in Kansas anymore, and we are living in the closest thing we’ve seen to pre-World War II Germany than anything since then. Suit up and stop theorizing and speculating. It’s showtime.

The first thing I’m not going to tell you is that collapse can be avoided or that human ingenuity and technology will come up with something to spare us from it. I’m not going to tell you that there will be some mass movement-some magic http://www.collapse.org/ that will organize progressives into a groundswell of protest, writing letters to Congress, creating blogs and websites, supporting the “right” candidate, and asking for donations. No, what I’m going to tell you is that as a nation and as a planet, we are screwed, fucked, and shit out of luck, or if you prefer Spanish, estamos jodidos.

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May 24 2007

New Life - On Its Way Out

Published by cyrano2 under Raping the Earth, Souless Capitalists, Species Extinction, Climate Change

by Rowan Wolf

5/24/07

It was reported that scientists have found more than 700 new species of sea life in the Antarctic. Hailed as a “treasure trove,” the species were found by the Andeep (Antarctic benthic deep-sea biodiversity) project in waters thought “too hostile” to contain life.

It always makes me sad when “new species” are discovered because it generally means that they will be gone soon. It means that technological, consuming and polluting society has crashed its way into an area that had remained remote an unexploited.

It seems that it is always because the forest has been destroyed to the “deep forest,” or a previously inaccessible area has been made accessible. The species - and sometimes people - who have lived quite fine for millennia, are suddenly exposed and then destroyed.

With the sea life deep in the Antarctic, multiple threats now present themselves: the threat of being discovered and sampled and studied and - if there is a commercial possibility - exploited; the threat of global warming. Both threats are the consequences of a societal paradigm that frames itself as separate from the world and the inhabitants of it.

We need to come to an awareness, that we are not part of a society that values life -only one that values its own life. We need the awareness that we are an “anti-biotic” society - against life. If the world, including this society, are going to survive, then that consciousness needs to change dramatically. Culturally and institutionally we need to become “pro-biotic” - pro-life - and that is all life, not just our own. Pro-biotic does not mean moving to a “sustainability” platform that trades development against destruction. We are past any hope of “sustainable development” in that context. We need to repair before we can even consider sustainability.

We see the resistance to repairing the damage in the various approaches to addressing carbon emissions and global warming. The capitalist approach is “carbon trading.” Buying carbon stock. Spreading out emissions, or sequestering emissions underground or on the ocean floor. The scientists tell us clearly that we need an immediate 80% reduction in carbon emissions. That is not carbon “neutral.” That is reduce. It doesn’t mean stopping where we are. Further, that even with an 80% reduction, that so much damage is done that no one can predict the recovery time.

Meanwhile, there are 700 newly “discovered” species under the rapidly melting Antarctic ice, and the race is on to catalogue them before they go extinct.

Links of Interest

Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research

intute: science, engineering & technology

U.S. Antarctic Program

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