Democracy Now has been following the Fire Drill Fridays sparked by Greta Thunberg’s clear voice — a youth crying in the wilderness of world and national houses of legislation which remain deaf to the urgency of acting to protect the planet and life everywhere. Jane Fonda is busy stirring a national day of civil disobedience EVERY Friday on the steps of Capitol Hill. Listen in:
https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2020/1/13/jane_fonda_fire_drill_fridays_washington
Photo by Susan Feathers
In the past few days we have learned that major investors and businesses are getting in step with climate action. BlackRock investing firm announced they would no longer invest in businesses that are not meeting climate change objectives.
“Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” Mr. Fink wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. “The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.” ~ New York Times 1-14-20
Microsoft announced a Net Negative carbon footprint plan to reduce its emissions and to eliminate its carbon footprint completely by 2030.
The scientific consensus is clear. The world confronts an urgent carbon problem. The carbon in our atmosphere has created a blanket of gas that traps heat and is changing the world’s climate. Already, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1 degree centigrade. If we don’t curb emissions, and temperatures continue to climb, science tells us that the results will be catastrophic. ~ Microsoft Commitment to Sustainability
The most recent Climate Change Summit (COP 25) came to an ignoble end with few agreements among the member countries on coordinated decrease in carbon dioxide and methane pollution. This in the midst of reports flooding media about new or more advanced warming impacts on ecosystems pole to pole, ocean to ocean.
Yet this sad result is not surprising, is it? With one of the largest, and longest contributors of CO2 to the atmosphere bailing out of the Paris Agreement (US), it has complicated and weakened the coordination and commitments of countries to less than 2 degrees Celsius warming by 2050.
What’s more ,the most vulnerable places, already experiencing life threatening changes in the earth, sky, and waters, can’t pay for the kind of adaptation necessary to assure some form of well-being, forcing migrations and/or conflicts. All results that are predictable due to a lack of responsibility for each other.
Regionalism and nationalism are dangerous in light of global problems that we can only solve or mitigate together. Why should Americans care that our President, White House, and half the voting public have chosen to turn their backs on the world of which we are an integral part? Because it is just ignorant not to recognize that the well-being of countries worldwide benefits us in terms of security, wealth, and health. Any grade school child can conjure that.
All political affiliations of voters must urge their representatives to get off the barge heading for annihilation and start building in the safe guards for what is already wide spread destruction. We are right now teetering on massive problems caused by ever greater warming.
Its great we have a strong economy, wonderful. We’ll need it. Let us not bury our heads in the sand. If Climate Change goes against your religion, I suggest you sit down for a long chat with God. I am sure our Creator does not want his progeny to kill life everywhere so that we can have more money in the bank.
A great country must be a wise one. A great citizenry must strive to use logic and prudence when playing with the very requirements for life. We cannot play God by tweaking the stock market. But, that is what we are doing. Chasing the Almighty Dollar, eyes shut, bellies full, and souls in tatters.
Photo by Susan Feathers
Tomorrow I am flying to New York for the 39th Harry Chapin Run Against Hunger. This year’s race is very special because the community of Croton-on-Hudson is honoring the life and legacy of Carol Falter, daughter of my friends Betty and Bill. Carol lost her battle with pancreatic cancer at age 39, in the fullness of her life as a dynamic leader in education and youth development.
The race, which is run to honor the legacy of Harry Chapin, who was also taken in the prime of his life, is a fitting place to celebrate family, friends, and the principle that any one life can remake the world through passion for a cause greater than themselves. Below is what I will share with the community on October 20 – Race Day:
Thirty-nine years ago, this race was born in the office of Pastor Sandra Myers at Asbury United Methodist Church. Sandra called me to her office one Fall day in 1980 to help her establish a fundraising event for the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR).
Later that day I met up with my running buddies, who are here today, to celebrate the life and legacy of Carol Falter and this amazing community in which she was nourished as she grew.
Molly Connors, Kate Glynn, Betty Falter, Dot Janis, and I were training for a Leggs’ Mini-Marathon in Central Park. Let me set the context for you. Women were just discovering they in fact could run long distances without their uterus dropping. Yes, that was a falsehood perpetuated during the women’s movement to keep her out of the long-distance running competition. Katherine Switzer broke that barrier in 1967 — with the aid of a man, I might add — who held off a race official who sought to kick her out of the Boston Marathon. It would not be until 1972 that women were allowed to run that race.
On our run that day, we discussed a 10K race for Pastor Myers’ idea as a community project. Croton had long been a running community. The first U.S. chapter of the Hash House Harriers took root here. The dream of a race over the iconic dam and backroads of this beautiful place hovered in our minds. Pastor Myers named it the “Run Against Hunger” or RAH.
In July of 1981, Harry Chapin’s life ended in a car crash on Long Island. Harry had helped establish President Carter’s Commission on Hunger and Poverty, donating a third of his band’s earnings to charity, and established World Hunger Year. In his last three years, he raised $3M to end poverty.
A Croton resident and producer of Harry’s music asked that we make the RAH a tribute to Harry’s life and work, donated t-shirts, and that is how this race came to be in October 1981. We marvel at this community’s commitment to continue the work. Carol Falter loved this race. She later became an ultra-marathon runner herself – maybe because she first ran in the Fun Run here with her parents and brothers. She herself left an abiding legacy of work on behalf of youth and education, answering Harry’s challenge when he wrote these lyrics:
Oh, if a man tried
To take his time on Earth
And prove before he died
What one man’s life could be worth
I wonder what would happen
to this world*
Carol and generations of women have since changed the pronouns to be more inclusive!
*Lyrics from the Chapin song: I wonder what would happen (Gold Medal Collection Album)
As the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board
prepared for its first set of Doomsday Clock
discussions this fall, it began referring to the
current world security situation as a “new
abnormal.” This new abnormal is a pernicious
and dangerous departure from the time when
the United States sought a leadership role in
designing and supporting global agreements
that advanced a safer and healthier planet. The
new abnormal describes a moment in which
fact is becoming indistinguishable from fiction,
undermining our very abilities to develop and
apply solutions to the big problems of our time.
The new abnormal risks emboldening autocrats
and lulling citizens around the world into a
dangerous sense of anomie and political paralysis.
The Bulletin serves as an authoritative guide that confronts man-made threats to our existence by advancing actionable ideas for the planet and its people. Read the latest bulletin below.
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Summary PDF for Policy-Makers (and the public)
Biodiversity is a key driver of ecosystem health and resilience. The more variety of genes and groups of genes in a particular habitat (# and kinds of living plants and animals, invertebrates, etc) the greater is its resiliency to impacts such as climate change, and human development and habitation.
A good example can be seen in our coastal ecosystems where an abundance of grasses, landforms, certain trees, sea grasses and coral reefs, promote resiliency to storms, development, etc. Dense human habitation along coastal areas has polluted waters that kill sea grasses, result in erosion of beaches which once provided a barrier to incoming storms and sea level rise.
Read the report and chat with your local city council and with your representations. Send them this short summary report. summary_for_policymakers_ipbes_global_assessment
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2004
Wangari Maathai grew up in her homeland in Kenya, living close to the earth and learning traditional Kikuyu values and practices. Her memoir, Unbound, describes her daily activities as a child, her mother’s teachings, and how her people regarded the streams and forests in a land where the balance of nature is delicate, not to be abused without serious consequences for its inhabitants.
In Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, Maathai’s wisdom is distilled onto each page, every sentence the next drop in the flow. Wangari describes herself as working practically to solve problems she learned about in discussions with communities and among women’s groups. Their need for clean water, and for access to earn a living, were her daily concerns. Eventually, Wangari and the women she served established the Greenbelt Movement that planted over 30 million trees in Kenya.
In Replenishing, Wangari’s concerns about the destruction of the environment in Kenya are examined in light of the world’s sacred traditions. Always a practical perspective, her observations and reflections give readers much to consider often through humor. For example she writes that God in his wisdom created Adam on Friday. If he’d created him on Monday he’d have perished for lack of food!
Wangari Maathai’s clarity of thought is invaluable in this age where massive destruction of oceans, rivers, wildlands, and forests have imperiled life the world over. She and the women of Kenya remind us of the earth-shaking power of people to replenish the earth, if we choose to do so.
Listen to an interview with Wangari Maathai on OnBeing.org.
