Tag Archives: climate breakdown

Here Come the Carbon Bombs

This week, we urge careful consideration of timely and essential reporting from The Guardian, detailing a series of fossil fuel “carbon bomb” projects presently underway, or in advanced stages of planning.

These hyper-extractive projects, launched beneath the cover of a looming world war, threaten to push us well past irreversible tipping points, into the terminal stage of global environmental breakdown.

A few graphics relayed below; they speak for themselves.

 

 

Standing against the impending environmental bombscape, we find brave activists such as the formidable Janet Alkire, Chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who sent us the below update earlier today:

 

 

Aŋpétu wašté. I bring you an update today about our fight to stop the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL). As you’ll see in our new video, the Tribes of the Oceti Sakowin are united in this mission, and with organizing help from the Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance, we recently gathered to strategize about the best way to achieve our goal of stopping DAPL before it spills and poisons our water. I also recently met with Assistant Secretary of the Army Michael Connor to discuss the disturbing lack of progress and demand transparency with DAPL’s environmental process.

Watch: leaders from across the Oceti Sakowin came together recently to discuss our #NoDAPL strategy.

So far, none of our concerns are being addressed, and the process is compromised by secrecy. Standing Rock has requested a number of basic documents and plans, such as DAPL’s oil spill response plan for the Missouri River. We have received no information whatsoever, and the failure to cooperate with our Tribe and our emergency managers is unacceptable. DAPL, of course, continues to operate illegally, with no permit for its crossing under Lake Oahe on Standing Rock Nation’s doorstep.

I also called upon the Army to consider the Notice of Violation issued by federal regulators against the pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer LP, for its repeated violations of pipeline safety rules with DAPL. The only right course of action is for the Army Corps of Engineers to shut down the pipeline now and properly address these violations in the upcoming Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

For now, the EIS is mysteriously stalled, even as Energy Transfer and its related companies continue to display a distressing pattern of oil spills and safety violations. Over a recent 8-year period, nine pipelines owned and controlled by these companies experienced nearly 300 spills — including 50 large spills in High Consequence Areas such as Lake Oahe.

You can see why Tribal leaders are unified in our concern about protecting our water and our resolve to do something about it. I ask you, as a friend in this fight, to stay connected with us and ready to take action as soon as the EIS is released. You’ll be hearing more from me soon. By staying strong together, can we still win justice for Standing Rock and all of the Oceti Sakowin. Mni wiconi — water is life.

Wopila tanka — thank you for staying united with us!

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How Long?

Now comes Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, speaking at the Youth4Climate Conference Milan. The image links to a video, as relayed from Democracy Now.

The video also includes Greta Thunberg’s “Blah, Blah, Blah” speech, misleading as a transcript, but very clear and powerful via the video.

Neither Nakate nor Thunberg (nor the thousands of youth climate activists who later marched in the streets) are fooled by the feckless slogans and cynical accounting games presently masquerading as climate policy.

A few days after her speech and not far from Milan, Italy’s Genoa province experienced close to three feet of rain within 24 hours; a new European record, whatever that means.

How long shall the land mourn?

 

 

 

 


Of Silence and the Flood

This week, we turn to an interview on Democracy Now: the voice of George Monbiot, who articulates a number of uncomfortable issues not addressed by the media storm surrounding hurricane Harvey’s itinerary over the past week.

Images are from 36.5, a “duration performance with the sea” conceived by Sarah Cameron Sunde.

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From Sunde’s project website, we relay the following:

36.5 / a durational performance with the sea is a time-based project spanning seven years and six continents: New York-based artist Sarah Cameron Sunde stands in a tidal area for a full cycle, usually 12-13 hours, as water engulfs her body and then reveals it again. The public is invited to participate by joining Sarah in the water and by marking the passing hours from the shore. The project began in 2013 as a response to Hurricane Sandy’s impact on New York City and the parallel that Sunde saw in the the struggle for an artist to survive on a daily basis and the struggle of humanity to survive in the face of sea-level rise. The project was developed in Maine, Mexico and San Francisco 2013-2014, and launched on a global scale in The Netherlands in 2015. The fifth iteration was recently completed in Bangladesh. The performance is filmed from multiple perspectives and then translated into a multi-channel video installation that can communicate with a wider audience. 

Plans are underway for future iterations in New Zealand, Brazil, and Senegal, and working towards a large-scale iteration in New York City with an anticipated date of August 2020. 36.5 acknowledges the temporary nature of all things and considers our contemporary relationship to water, as individuals, in community, and as a civilization.