Today we simply relay a video from the Guardian; no editorial comment required.
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Category Archives: riptides
Drill, Baby, Drill
First off, we relay yesterday’s press release from the nonpartisan conservation organization, The Center for Western Priorities:
DENVER—President-elect Donald Trump announced at Mar-a-Lago tonight that he intends to nominate North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to serve as Secretary of the Interior.
The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Executive Director Jennifer Rokala:
“Doug Burgum comes from an oil state, but North Dakota is not a public lands state. His cozy relationship with oil billionaires may endear him to Donald Trump, but he has no experience that qualifies him to oversee the management of 20 percent of America’s lands.
“Running the Interior department requires someone who can find balance between recreation, conservation, hunting, ranching, mining, and—yes—oil drilling. If Doug Burgum tries to turn America’s public lands into an even bigger cash cow for the oil and gas industry, or tries to shrink America’s parks and national monuments, he’ll quickly discover he’s on the wrong side of history.”
In April 2024, Doug Burgum and oil billionaire Harold Hamm organized a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Donald Trump suggested oil and gas executives raise $1 billion for his campaign. At the dinner, Trump promised the executives they’d save far more than that after he repealed President Biden’s climate policies.
Quick facts
- The federal government owns less than 4 percent of North Dakota’s land — 1.7 million acres out of 44.4 million total acres.
- Seventy percent of Western voters want to protect clean water, air quality and wildlife habitats while providing opportunities to visit and recreate on public lands, compared to just 26 percent of voters who would rather ensure more domestic energy production by maximizing the amount of public lands available for responsible oil and gas drilling and mining, according to Colorado College’s 2024 State of the Rockies poll.
- Prioritizing conservation over maximizing energy production received majority support among Republicans, Democrats, and independents in the poll.
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Second, regarding the utter disgrace of COP29, we relay a quote from Dawda Cham, representing the Gambian NGO HELP-Gambia :
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A Dangerous Experiment
Now comes climate crisis researcher-writer David Wallace-Wells, with a few critically important and lucid comments made in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton within the lost paradise of Florida.
Here at DP, we have a strong suspicion, what the answer will be; an answer most are not prepared to contemplate, let alone live with the consequences.
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Everything Is Burning
Now comes the voice of Megaron Txucarramãe, an Indigenous elder and leader from the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, with a cry of urgency, agony and despair delivered within the context of a recent report (together with many valuable links), worthy of your close consideration.
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Hungry Ghosts
As Eileen Crist brilliantly documented back in 2019, deep-sea mining is not only a grim prospect for the future; it is a reality in the present via exploratory permits and temporary leases, perversely spun as essential for the fabrication of “green tech.” Crist writes:
In case you have never heard the term “hungry ghosts,” they are archetypal beings with extremely narrow throats and obese bellies, so that no matter how much they eat they never get enough. Never enough. Forever hungry. “Always encroaching,” in the words of Native American Shawnee Chief Tecumseh.
To refer to the vast oceans on Mother Earth as “the common heritage of humankind” in the midst of an accelerating extinction event, together with a deepening climate emergency, represents human supremacism at its most omnicidal extreme. In that same essay, Crist goes on to write:
HUNGRY GHOSTS DEVOUR THEIR LAST MEAL
We stand with the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition and others who say NO to the terminal meal of the Hungry Ghosts.
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A Tale of Two Sinkings
Now comes Amy Goodman, with an introduction to a Democracy Now segment reflecting on the disparity of media attention between the implosion of Titan/ic delusions and the tragedy of the Adriana. The entire segment, linked via the image below, is worthy of close consideration.
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Time to Focus on Lifeboats
We launch this twelfth DP navigation with the most consequential graphic visualization of our prevailing crisis, vividly depicting increases in global surface temp between the years of 1880 and 2021.
TIME TO THINK ABOUT LIFEBOATS
The notion of a “desperado philosophy” descends from the plight of Melville’s imagined Pequod, in the midst of its own environmental catastrophe, an experience recorded by sole survivor Ishmael, saved by the “life buoy” of Queequeg’s handcrafted coffin. Queequeg, whose inscribed body was itself a kind of novel, recording the distant past and destiny of his own people.
The practice of desperado philosophy, or some may call it a vocation, requires that we remain calm even in the midst of the most violent riptides. Yes, the ship may be foundering on the rocks of our own past navigational errors; yet we know that panic will only make the situation worse.
Switching metaphors, though we agree with Greta Thunberg that we must act like our house (or ship) is on fire; that does not mean we should trample each other to death on the way to the exits, or scratch & claw over lifejackets.
As climate emergency deepens, whether expressed through the slow violence of drought and famine or through more dramatic phenomena such as bomb cyclones and wildfires, let’s stop focussing on the sinking Titanic and focus on the vibrant creativity required for the design, construction and sustenance of viable lifeboats, by which we mean community-scaled projects with a focus on resilience, skill-building, local self-reliance and climate adaptation.
To those who object that a focus on lifeboats sounds like doom & gloom, we respond: no, doom & gloom is NO lifeboats.
This year, we will be posting less frequently, likely closer to a twice monthly rather than weekly rhythm, including occasional posts that will feature lifeboats worthy of close consideration for DP reader support and even replication. Given the scale of the challenges, there is no limit on how many lifeboats we will need. In the end, some may work better than others, yet there is no way to make that evaluation in advance. As always, we rely upon you, our DP community of readers, to guide this voyage. If you know of lifeboats in your own communities worthy of consideration and support, please send links.
We need to communicate, collaborate and co-create now more than ever before. Cheers to all for the year ahead; it promises to be another wild one.
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Show & Tell
In response to the typically grandiose claims made by Elon Musk while updating the world on “progress” regarding brain chips, the honorable non-profit, Physicians for Responsible Medicine, released their own Show & Tell.
Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interfaces Are the Future
Devices implanted in the brain come with a myriad of problems, including difficulty of repair and a high potential for severe medical complications. In comparison, noninvasive BMIs can allow for the risk-free monitoring of large-scale neuronal activity across the entire brain.
While Neuralink continues its invasive, painful, deadly experiments, noninvasive methods—which often rely on brain signals read using an electroencephalogram (EEG)—are already changing patients’ lives and hold even greater promise:
- Noninvasive BMIs can improve quality of life for older adults and elderly patients. They “have been used for restoring memory and planning using electromagnetic stimulation and biofeedback that modulate activity in a patient’s brain as part of a rehabilitation program….Moreover, invasive [BMIs] that require implantation of the device might be a serious ethical issue. Therefore, non-invasive EEG-based [BMIs]…appear to be the most promising technologies.”
- They can “assist paralyzed patients by providing access to the world without requiring surgical intervention.”
- They can allow patients with limited mobility to control robotic arms. “[Invasive BCIs] require a substantial amount of medical and surgical expertise to correctly install and operate, not to mention cost and potential risks to subjects…”
- They can allow patients with severe tetraplegia to control a wheelchair.
- Noninvasive BMIs can also allow people to communicate directly using a computer, and research is being done to improve this capability.
The development of noninvasive BMIs should be the focus of innovation, and there is clearly much discussion in support of moving in that direction. Neuralink should halt its animal experiments immediately and invest in human-relevant research.
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DP view: Neuralink is nothing more than a synthesis of technophilic hubris with human supremacist abuse of other sentient beings, in this case, our close relatives.
We are also skeptical of noninvasive BMIs for the simple reason that we live in a time of Inverted Utopia wherein we are unable to imagine the full range of consequences of our technological innovations, particularly when it comes to messing with our brains.
We close this week’s post with a montage of excerpts from the TV series The 100, regarding a lethal intermingling of brains chips, AI, violence, anthropocentrism, Inverted Utopians, oblivion and extinction:
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Imperial Imperatives
This week, for reasons that we are sure need not be scribed here, we bend an ear to the distinguished historian Caroline Elkins, author of Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. Excerpts from a recent interview below.
The image documents the detention of alleged participants in the so-called Mau Mau Rebellion, with a caption added by DP.
THE CIVILIZING PROCESS
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Downward Toward Barbarism
In the aftermath of yet another lethal school assault, twenty three years after Columbine, we highlight a brief response from The Atlantic staff writer David Frum, with the opening paragraphs demonstrating that even a notorious warmonger known mostly for coining the spectacularly unhelpful phrase “axis of evil” can, on such a tragic occasion as Uvalde, strike the right notes.
We also take note of a public statement made by the honorable coach of the Golden State Warriors, Steve Kerr, providing an exemplary embodiment of what it means to speak truth to power.
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Desperado Philosophy 