Now comes author Sarah Wilson via a few excerpts from a recent interview centered on her new book, I Eat the Stars. The title descends from a poem by astronomer Rebecca Elson.
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Defend Public Lands
Now comes Earthjustice, with a call to action to defend public lands that in many cases are also sacred to First Nations communities:
The attacks on our national monuments continue at a relentless pace. At the behest of industries such as coal and hardrock mining and politicians like Senator Mike Lee of Utah, President Trump just dramatically shrunk Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments by over 90%. This move could enable drilling, mining, and other harmful activities on these iconic public lands. We need your help to tell Congress to defend these national monuments.
Loved by Utah residents and outdoor enthusiasts across the country, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments have been stewarded by Indigenous people for centuries.
Reducing protections would:
- Risk outdoor access for hunters, hikers, and campers
- Threaten a combined 3.2 million acres of wildlife habitat
- Open the door for mining, drilling, and development – which will harm the landscape and reduce public usability
Growing influence from extractive industries threatens monuments and other public lands that belong to us all. This follows a pattern of administrative and legislative attacks on our public lands, like the recission of the Roadless Rule, the withdrawal of the 20-year mining ban next to the Boundary Waters, and the opening up of marine monuments to commercial fishing.
What’s more, this attack could open the door for similar attacks on national monuments across the country.
We need you to tell Congress: hands off our national monuments!
Let’s be clear: These attacks are illegal and deeply unpopular. But we know this fight is winnable because we’ve been here before: The first Trump administration tried to strip protections from half of Grand Staircase-Escalante and nearly 90% of Bears Ears National Monument. We, alongside our tribal partners, immediately filed lawsuits on behalf of conservation groups. President Biden then restored them in 2021.
Tell Congress today: Reject these attacks and defend our public lands!
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Termination Shock
Now comes a quartet of distinguished climate scientists: Raymond Pierrehumbert, Julia Slingo, Michael Mann and Valerie Masson-Delmotte.
Below, a few salient paragraphs from their recent editorial opposing solar engineering, which in our view represents the ultimate dead end of Human Supremacism.
To these questions, we suggest the only rational answer = a resounding NO.
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Crazy Begets Crazy
Relayed from excellent reporting & analysis elsewhere, the following evidence of human supremacy in its deranged and potentially terminal phase:
No wonder, then, the following survey results from Gallup:
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Promethean Shame
Now comes Nicholas Carr, with a few salient paragraphs from his New Cartographies substack, always worth close consideration:
We find ourselves today, Anders wrote in The Obsolescence of the Human, surrounded by products that don’t appear to us as having been produced by us. We have handed off so much of their design and production to industrial technologies that we can no longer take a shared pride in their invention and manufacture. Indeed, they have come to project an otherness that seems not just separate from us but superior to us. They mock us as outdated masses of meat and bone. Today’s products, Anders observed,
are simply “there.” We encounter them primarily as necessary, desirable, superfluous, affordable, or unaffordable consumer goods that become “mine” only after I have bought them. As such, they are much more likely to be proof of one’s own insufficiency than evidence of one’s power.
This sense of insufficiency transformed “Promethean pride” into “Promethean shame”—the shame contemporary man feels at having been born instead of made, of being a product of natural processes rather than technological ones. “He despises himself,” wrote Anders, “in the same way that things would despise him if they could.” The shame, he went on, becomes particularly sharp when a person first sees a so-called thinking machine:
As for the man who is for the first time confronted with a working computing machine, self-aggrandizement and pride are even more alien to him. An observer who erupts with the exclamation, “My goodness, aren’t we great guys, to be capable of this!” when encountering such a machine is a clown, a figment of the imagination. Quite the contrary! He rather murmurs with a shake of his head, “My god, it’s incredible what it—the machine—can do!” At the same time, he feels highly ill at ease in his creaturely skin, for the machine half gives him the creeps and half puts him to shame.
Though it was written seventy-five years ago, that last sentence strikes me as one of the more perceptive descriptions of man’s confrontation with generative AI: “he feels highly ill at ease in his creaturely skin, for the machine half gives him the creeps and half puts him to shame.”
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So where does Promethean Shame end? As Anders writes elsewhere: in a world without us!
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The Extinction Committee
During times marked by senseless violence of humans against other humans, there is a tendency to forget that we remain in the midst of an extinction event. That makes the endless senseless violence inflicted upon other species by an omnicidal clique all the more abhorrent. Their cynical and ignorant actions must be vigorously opposed, as specified in the below press release from Earthjustice:
On March 31, a panel full of Trump appointees voted to give the oil industry permission to harm and kill imperiled species across the Gulf of Mexico. Earthjustice will see them in court.
The panel is known as the Endangered Species Committee – aka the “God Squad” or the “Extinction Committee,” for its ability to decide the fates of imperiled species. This committee can grant exemptions from Endangered Species Act protections in exceedingly rare cases where they are at odds with “public interest.”
The administration claims this exemption is urgently needed for reasons of “national security,” citing concerns about reliable energy supply. However, this move will not speed up oil production or lower today’s high gas prices. No oil projects in the Gulf have been rejected due to the ESA, nor is the oil industry facing any burdensome requirements under the law that are slowing or halting offshore drilling activities.
We are suing the Trump administration for abusing the concept of a national security exemption. Greenlighting extinction in the Gulf will not make anyone safer, nor will it result in lower prices at the pump for Americans. What it could do is trigger ecological destruction.
Rice’s whales, the only whales that live year-round in the Gulf, have seen populations dwindle to fewer than 100 individuals in the years since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster decimated the species. Scientists have warned that we could see the first human-caused extinction of a large whale species in recorded history if better protections are not implemented.
Because of the committee’s vote, sea turtles, fish, rays, manatees, corals, and birds are also now without protection. Existing regulations already allow the oil industry to harass, harm or kill sea turtles hundreds of thousands of times per year in the course of its operations.
The Endangered Species Act provides the committee with the authority to waive protections only in extreme circumstances when there is no way for an activity to proceed without leading to species extinction. But that’s not the case here: The oil industry could choose to operate in a way that would be less harmful to imperiled wildlife.
This isn’t the Trump administration’s only recent step to weaken safeguards for the Gulf. Earlier this month, the administration recklessly approved “Kaskida,” a new, ultra-deepwater drilling project. The developer is BP, the company responsible for Deepwater Horizon.
Greenlighting oil and gas projects that will span years threatens to lock us into a future of fossil fuel dependence. Right now, we’re seeing how the volatility of oil prices leads to instability for people across the U.S. That’s one of the many reasons we’re fighting for a clean energy transition. Wind and solar prices have been falling steadily for decades, and they don’t depend on an ongoing supply of fuel.
Earthjustice will continue our work to protect this vulnerable region against the harms of fossil fuel development. We have challenged all nine offshore oil-and-gas auctions that the U.S. government has held since 2018 for violating federal environmental laws – and we’ve won every case. We’re ready for this fight too.
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Beneath the Geopolitical Mayhem
Saturated by wave after wave of updates chronicling violence inflicted by humans upon other humans, we tune our attention to all the additional damage inflicted upon the whole of life by the gradually accelerating violence of the Climate Emergency and the Sixth Extinction. Of course, the two levels of violence are deeply linked via human supremacism, and appear to be feeding energy into each other, with no end in sight.
Below, excerpts from today’s press release from the World Meteorological Organization, together with a link to the full report. It makes for sober reading; hence our ongoing focus on the theme of lifeboats!
Geneva, Switzerland (WMO) – The Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean and melting of ice, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These rapid and large-scale changes have occurred within a few decades but will have harmful repercussions for hundreds – and potentially thousands – of years.
Key messages
- WMO State of Climate report confirms 2015-2025 hottest 11 years on record
- Earth’s energy imbalance is highest in sixty five-year record
- The ocean has been absorbing about eighteen times the annual human energy use each year for the past two decades
- Extreme weather impacts millions and costs billions
- World Meteorological Day: observing today to protect tomorrow
LINK TO THE FULL REPORT
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Rule of Law Under Attack
Now comes Earthjustice, with a recent press release:
The ability to hold wrongdoers accountable in court is foundational to our democracy, environmental protections, and the rule of law. When large corporations release toxic pollution into our air and water, our legal system should empower people to seek justice and fight back against polluters and harmful industries that threaten the health and well-being of our communities.
Under the second Trump administration, that right is under threat. The administration and its allies in Congress have spent the last fourteen months working to dismantle our access to the courts in five key ways:
- Eliminating or undermining judicial review
- Limiting who can sue wrongdoers
- Making it too expensive to sue and harder to win
- Limiting judicial discretion
- Blocking meaningful case settlements
That’s why we released our new report,Access to Justice: Defending the Public’s Right to Seek Justice in Court. It outlines these attacks, provides specific examples of how the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are working to codify them into law, and details the ways we’re fighting back.
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We also note the death of distinguished philosopher Jürgen Habermas, with whom DP was fortunate to study while an unruly undergraduate.
A thoughtful review of his philosophical legacy accessible via clicking on the below photograph:
A TIRELESS ADVOCATE FOR PEACEFUL NEGOTIATION AND DIALOGUE
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Across All Data Sets
Now comes a press release from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research:
Global warming rate (in °C per decade) from the Berkeley Earth global temperature data: The blue line shows the linear trends for the time before and after 2015 (light blue the uncertainty range). The red line shows the linear trend for 10‐year windows of the data, at 1-year intervals. Figure: PIK
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025GL118804
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