Now comes esteemed DP correspondent Joseph A. Jackson with a lucid & concise commentary on recent events within our beleaguered Republic:
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Tag Archives: climate emergency
A River in Egypt
Now comes the voice of Tad Delay, author of the recently published Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change, via an interview well worth listening to in its entirely.
An excerpt transcribed below, with captioned image added by DP.
TAKE A HARD LOOK IN THE MIRROR OR BLAME THIS ON ANTIFA: CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE!
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Enjoy It While It Lasts
This week, we relay a graphic from a Guardian report that was on the front page this morning, yet not this afternoon. Apparently, the all-powerful Algorithm (nicknamed “Oz”) has decided there have not been sufficient eyeballs scanning the page to justify a front page spotlight any longer.
No surprise, given ongoing widespread lethargy and complacence in the face of a crisis that will soon be irreversible.
One person who understands the dire implications of the above: Andrew Dessler, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A & M, who provided us with our title by stating, “Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest [on] record. This in turn means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
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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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Ground Zero
This week, we listen once again to strong, uncompromising truth-speaking from Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee and a relentless advocate for her home ground.
In September 2021, Bernadette won the Sierra Club’s Changemaker Award. They wrote, “The Gwich’in Steering Committee is largely responsible for convincing every major US Bank to pledge not to fund projects that drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Refuge, making this a day-one issue for President Biden.”
Yet challenges in the region remain acute, as the climate crisis deepens and accelerates. Excerpts from a recent dialogue below, with images added by DP.
DP verdict on COP27: an echo of COP26.
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All Hands On Deck
Now comes Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the novel Ministry for the Future, which has been making the rounds here at DP while the climate emergency becomes ever more acute, with increasingly dangerous consequences, not just for human communities, but for the whole of life on mother earth.
Below, a brief excerpt from a recent interview on the Bioneers website; the image, also relayed from Bioneers, links to Robinson’s excellent 2015 keynote address, even more relevant today.
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Through the Deadly Shallows
Now comes the voice of Johann Hari, author of the recently published book, Stolen Focus, an exploration into declining attention spans and the deterioration of our individual and collective ability to think deeply. A lucid exposition that, alas, many readers may find difficult to follow.
Below, a few brief excerpts from an interview with the exceptionally skillful podcaster Kamea Chayne:
HUMAN BRAIN FOLLOWING THREE HOURS ON FACEBOOK
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Conference of the Polluters
Now comes indigenous climate activist Tom Goldtooth with a few cogent observations following the opening days of COP26, as relayed from a recent interview. Images added by DP.
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Black Summer
Thanks to all who responded with such sacred rage and support for last week’s post, in which we amplified the voice of Amazonian indigenous leader Nemonte Nenquimo; this week we bend an ear to another voice that echoes Nenquimo in its urgency, yet from a different location in the Global South: Australia, following the horrific 2019-2020 burn season, known as “Black Summer”.
Now comes Joëlle Gergis, writing from the front lines of the deepening Climate Emergency in a recent essay, excerpted below. Images are relayed from the site of artist Giuseppe Licari, documenting an installation dating from 2016, titled Contrappunto.
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About his work, Licari writes:
My work explores the socio-economical, cultural and political practices that intervene on, and alter the form of contemporary natural landscapes around us. Subject both of science and art, the landscape functions both as a mirror and as a lens: in it we see the space we occupy and ourselves as we occupy it. With my work I abstract and re-interpret landscapes engaging in an open-ended investigation of transferring the physical experience of a territory away from the locus of its original existence via discrete or bold interventions.
My aim is to confront the public with nature’s omnipresence, creating new spaces of sensorial and social experiences. Intending to provide the audience with an active role in my work I use a variety of techniques and media, such as installations, performances, workshops and public art, to better address the needs of each idea. The heterotopic landscapes I create constitute places of memories in which the emotions of single individuals become inevitably part of a collective experience.
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Art Into Life
As wildfires continue their hungry devastation across California and Oregon, we have been re-reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a spare yet powerful novel that we have always thought of as an anticipatory documentary narrative, describing a near future now in the process of presenting itself.
A favorite passage:
NOTHING TO SEE
And the closing passage:
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Desperado Philosophy 