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Like his Presidency, it is time for President Bush's looting, plundering, and pillaging of America’s natural beauty, ecological treasures and vital ecosystems to end

TAKE ACTION! The Bush Administration is rushing out long-term plans that would convert over 2 million acres of Oregon's national forests, with their towering trees, rushing rivers, and superb wildlife habitat, to empty clearcuts. Much of the forests under siege are in the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion [search] nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Crest, which contains some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the continent. There are some 20,000 miles of rivers, where wild Pacific salmon thrive. Ancient old-growth forests are abundant -- home to huge Douglas fir, western hemlock and western red cedar trees -- some well over 400 years old.

The plan increases logging by 400% and would target 100,000 acres of old-growth forests for destruction. Oregon Governor Kulongoski is the only elected official standing between the Bush Administration and western Oregon's forests, rivers and salmon. He is allowed a 60-day "consistency review" period to propose recommendations for changes to land use plans. Please encourage the governor to propose significant amendments, pushing this decision to the Obama administration. TAKE ACTION!

A coal plant permit in Utah was rejected [ark] yesterday by the E.P.A on the basis of lack of control of carbon dioxide [search]. The ruling puts in question permits for as many as 100 new plants [search], and should aid lawsuits against them as well.

This comes as the International Energy Agency confirms that coal will continue being the leading source of energy globally until at least 2030 [ark]. A week earlier in their annual report that had warned that the world's energy use was "patently unsustainable" [ark] and warned of 6°C rise in average global temperatures [ark]. As long as coal is burned to produce electricity, dumping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there is zero chance of maintaining historically reliable climatic patterns or a habitable Earth.

The No Ecology, No Economic Recovery Ever -- $75K or Bust – Keeping Green Hope Alive, Funding Appeal.

Dear Fellow Earth-Lovers,

It is time for Ecological Internet's (EI) annual end-of-year fund-raiser, which provides well over half of our modest yearly budget. We absolutely must raise $75,000 before the end of the year, or our 15 year effort on behalf of the Earth using the Internet comes to an end. With the past year of innovation and success, and with your help, we expect to do so. As a key network participant, I would like to ask YOU to make a donation to support EI's vital non-profit work on behalf of the Earth. Please donate NOW.

Ecological Internet (EI) -- guided by ecological science and using advanced IT networking -- promotes ambitious, sufficient ecological policies necessary to achieve global ecological sustainability. Our email network of tens of thousands of people -- including you, and millions of web users -- from virtually every country, seeks to bring about a higher level of consciousness regarding humanity's dependence upon the Earth for our shared survival. No one else is taking this approach at near the scale or level of success anywhere in the world.

The environment movement is failing because of a dearth of truth telling and a profound lack of ambition. Apart from what sells, is compatible with public opinion, or may remain unknown at the time; ecological truth exists and matters deeply. These truths include the laws of the universe and requirements for existence of organic life. When Homo sapiens perceived themselves, and lived, as one with the Earth, there was no problem. But now the ever so pugnacious hairless ape has asserted mastery over nature, with dire consequences that remain to be fully realized.

Shared survival depends critically upon first fully knowing and feeling eco-crises, and then formulating and implementing ecologically sufficient personal and social transformations. Let us be clear. We know of no life on Earth or elsewhere that does not require water, and in most cases an atmosphere and soil. The naturally evolved ecosystems required for human survival have been, and are being, ripped to shreds by a way of living that is wantonly ungrounded in requirements for maintaining the Earth and all life. The imminent end result can only be grisly, grimy despair and then death -- the end of existence for all.

New Earth Rising is based upon the premise that critical aspects, inter-relationships and the magnitude of the Earth crises remain unknown, thus sufficient and workable policies able to make a difference are unable to be proposed and implemented. Indeed, in its most basic and essential form, knowing the coming ecological Armageddon is quite simple: like a disease upon creation, humanity is burning and cutting the natural ecosystems that are the foundation and provide habitat for all life. At this point we must pray to Gaia that the Earth is more resilient than supposed, and that a revolutionary spirit of action can be awakened in time to continue being and ensure shared survival.

There is still hope things can be turned around. And the responses, difficult as they may seem in terms of gut-wrenching change and sacrifice, are equally straight-forward: ending the use of coal and ancient forest logging would largely solve the climate and biodiversity crises, and get us at least half way to equitable and just global ecological sustainability. The rest of the mess including soil, water, toxics and oceans are not insubstantial, and each could eliminate us and all complex life in their own right. But if the upright apes can simply stop cutting and burning -- and begin an era of ecological protection and restoration -- we have a real chance to address these other issues, and of surviving as a species, with other life, on a living Earth.

Ecological Internet's new e-zine, New Earth Rising, which I am pleased to hereby inaugurate, is committed to shrill yet reasoned ecological truth telling, and laying the foundation to obstruct all that lies between global citizenry and shared survival.  Our gamut is quite broad as militarism, poverty, elite rule and other issues all have an ecological sustainability element and will in turn be examined in order to know ecological truth so we together can take sufficient action. This issue is a bit of a hodge-podge -- examining entropy in relation to solar energy, while promoting the eating of peaches; revealing the lure of big plantation schemes, while showcasing innovative water management schemes; and with ancient memories and cartoons thrown in the mix.

New Earth Rising intends to be at the vanguard of bright green thought and a movement committed to ecological truth-telling that reveals the depth of the global ecological crisis, and to taking whatever ecologically informed steps are deemed necessary to ensure our shared survival and continuation of being. Where the others provide flash, and sell half-measures to fill their coffers, this is Ecological Internet's latest effort to provide thoughtful substance and ecologically based sufficient action. This is in line with Ecological Internet's mission of empowering the global movement for environmental sustainability, and working to commence the age of ecological sustainability and restoration.

As with our other efforts, if we ruffle some well groomed feathers, so be it. If confronting the Rainforest Action Network's support for ancient forest logging (banner photo above), which greenwashes the destruction of sacred primeval forest temples, is attacking another NGO, so be it. If writing emotionally of the truth of Gaia's demise threatens the powerful and wealthy, so be it. If calling for a reduction in human population, an end to coal and ancient forest logging, and other similarly ambitious yet crucial steps to transition to an era of ecological sustainability is just impossible crazy talk, so be it. We will strongly, even if our voices crack, tell truth to power -- and then demand action be taken or else -- until our last breath.

The experience of campaigning against environmental groups that greenwash first time logging of centuries old trees, across hundreds of million of hectares of the world's last ancient forests, has shown me just how pervasive delusional, wishful untruths are. Ecological Internet is not interested in being cool, but actually working effectively to know and achieve what must be done, because it is ecologically truthful.

It is better to pursue ambitious, sufficient environmental goals, and perhaps fail to achieve what must be done ecologically in order to maintain the species and Gaia indefinitely, but have a real shot at success, than to fully achieve what is inadequate and assuredly crashing nonetheless. 95% of the environmental movement is hand-waving, feel good reformist claptrap that is failing, and even if it succeeded, would be overwhelmingly insignificant given the crises' magnitude. Hanging banners and gracefully posing makes many seemingly solid greens feel good, but having fewer babies, consuming less and stopping ecosystem destruction at any cost, and insisting others do likewise, is what is needed.

Let the first issue of New Earth Rising be a call to action for individuals and society to think and act in ways necessary for our shared survival and continued being. The time is short my friends -- to be effective in these goals we must not fear to know ecological crises intimately, work tirelessly to formulate and implement sufficient responses, and then, if need be, commit to a revolutionary spirit of action, including laying our lifes on the line, for all that is truthful, beautiful and good. Our present way of living must die, and a new way of being birthed. New Earth Rising is dedicated to helping do so. Let's start now.

In our next issue, we intend to address the financial crisis and implications for global ecological sustainability, and we hereby issue a call for papers on the topic. As an economic recession (depression?) approaches, and the economy shrinks by 0.3% in the last quarter, this end to growth is greeted like it is the end of the world. Yet we know the real end of the Earth will come through ecologically mediated collapse of habitats which provide the requirements for life. We hope others will share their insight into the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing, grows forever – eventually positive feedback rips apart exponentially growing systems, be it economic or ecological. How can the growth machine be stopped?

Climate change, peak oil and all the other unfolding crises associated with pollution and resource depletion are all symptoms of one problem. There has been a fundamental change in the relationship between people and the Earth. We no longer have new frontiers to expand into when resources get scarce or our waste becomes intolerable. This change marks the maturity of the human species. Well-being now requires an equally fundamental change in how we manage our societies.

As long as the goal of expanding production and consumption is considered legitimate, we are in danger of overshooting planetary limits and collapsing. When sustainability gains legitimacy, as our primary goal, the possibility will emerge for evolving a mature social form, capable of long-term well-being. It is a Question of Direction.

"Enough" is the cue indicating physical maturity. A caterpillar spends its entire life gathering natural resources and growing. When it is big enough, it stops growing and undergoes a change of purpose. The butterfly that emerges from its cocoon is beautiful, it lives very lightly on the Earth, sipping the nectar of flowers, and its primary purpose is to launch the next generation.

This image speaks to a sustainable future. If we were to gather our satisfaction from the beauties of life and use the material world primarily to provide nutritious food and energy efficient shelter, we too could safely usher the next generations.

Moving beyond "enough"

Unfortunately, as a society, we missed our cue.

Industrial civilization reached "enough" in the 1920s when human need was vanquished. The industrial order went into crisis. What could they do to keep monetary fortunes expanding when productivity had grown to the point where everyone's needs could be met? On top of that, the labour force was campaigning for a 30 hour work week.

The work week had already shrunk, in recent decades, from 80 hours to 70, to 60, to 50, to 40 hours, on the premise that, due to high productivity, work had to be shared for everyone to have jobs. Fewer work hours would allow people to spend more time with their families, to pursue friendships, the arts, sports, education, and to develop parts of themselves that longed for expression. This was the cue that civilization had come of age.

Rather than celebrating our maturity and exploring the many wonders of being alive, the decision makers of that time launched a campaign against shorter hours and turned to advertising to encourage people to want more. After millennium of being content with the clothes, furniture and other goods that people worked hard to produce, an attitude of wastefulness was cultivated.

The fallacy of perpetual growth

By the 1950s this new "Gospel of Consumption" was well established. Retail analysts Victor Lebow described it thus:

"Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. . . We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate."

The critical evolutionary cue of "enough" was lost in the flurry of wasteful production that has brought us to the edge of ecological collapse. If we want to resolve climate change, or any of the other problems arising because we are outgrowing our planet, we have to acknowledge our changed circumstances and clearly adopt the goal of sustainability; not as a new style, or add-on, but as the core aspiration for decision making.

The illusion of our growth based economy is that disaster will strike if we stop growing. This is only true because of the way that mutual provision (the economy) is presently structured. Explaining why most of the world uses this system, what the problems with it are, the alternatives available and how to encourage the transformation, would take an entire book. Such is the purpose of my book. I only want to point out here that we have a fundamental choice to make, between growing until we drop and aiming for sustainability.

Just think what human imagination and creativity would come up with if we applied it to making goods durable, rather than engineering their obsolescence; if our educational and persuasive abilities were used to encourage the celebration of what life offers and to affirm each individual's potential, rather than promoting materialism and sewing the seeds of doubt and fear, only to suggest purchases to make the discomfort go away.

We could reduce our collective ecological footprint to the point where there certainly wouldn't be enough work to keep everyone busy all the time. We would then have to share the work that remained, breathe deeply, and learn how to enjoy our selves.

Deciding on direction

Legitimacy is the key to transformation. Imagine yourself, with a pack sac full of tools going into the wilderness with the intent of staying there, by yourself, for two years. How many of us would emerge after two years, in good health? And that is with tools that somebody else made and with a knowledge of how to use them obtained from our culture. Even the words and concepts with which we think, we get from the people around us. Without a society, a person is almost as useless as a computer with no programs. With no social support, survival would be a long shot.

Even in today's arms length economy, we are totally dependent on the products of other people's labour. In earlier times it was very clear that if our tribe or clan were to leave us behind, we would perish. We want, very deeply, to belong. The price of membership is subscription to the value system of one's society.

As long as our society ascribes legitimacy to the goal of producing and consuming ever more, it will be an uphill struggle to avoid over-exploiting natural resources and polluting beyond the limits of tolerance. If the goal of sustainability were wholeheartedly adopted, and was sincerely used as the foundation of decision making, we would, within a decade, be moving so clearly toward a sustainable world that we would no longer be worried for our children and grandchildren.

It is important to turn off unnecessary lights, compost and support local producers. Each step slows the expansion of human impacts on the Earth. More critically, your acts are testimony to the goal of sustainability. When such testimony, reach critical mass, anyone wishing to accelerate growth will feel like a smoker lighting up in a public space. From that point, solutions will emerge everywhere and be implemented in every corner of our world.

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Mike Nickerson is the author of three books on sustainability, including "Planning for Seven Generations" and "Life, Money & Illusion." For more information on the Question of Direction and how to stimulate an appropriate choice, see "The Challenge and the Goal" at http://www.SustainWellBeing.net/

Reprinted from Ottawa's Peace and Environment News
(January-February 2008)

This could be paradise. Mother Earth lies brown and soft under my feet, golden light shines through the leaves. Leaning against an old cork oak, I look into a little valley; the air is shimmering in the heat of a summer afternoon. The branches above give home to birds and beetles, and ferns are moving softly in the breeze.

This could be paradise. But in fact, it is not. The green of the little valley before me is created by rock roses – pioneer plants on devastated soils throughout the Mediterranean. Through their monotonous surface here and there the corpses of corks oak arise like sunken ships in a sandy bay. The opposite side of the valley is already clear, no oaks, no grass, not even rock roses – only grayish eucalyptus on top.

The cork oaks of southern Portugal are dying, and still no government and no university has found a formula to stop it. Even the proud tree at my back shows the unavoidable signs of the coming death: brown stains in the bark from fungi. Old farmers here say that the tree is crying.

And I am crying as well. It is not only about the century-old traditional culture that shaped the look of the Alentejo that is coming to a close. Desert is also developing right before our eyes. Southern Europe is turning into a second Sahel Zone.

I wonder why nobody runs shouting through the towns, ringing a bell, sounding the alarm: Watch out, wake up – our land, our mother is dying! What will we eat tomorrow?

The Sahara is coming north. Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece all suffer under increasing summer droughts, forests are burning, and in Portugal every twenty minutes a farmer gives up his farm. More than 80% of the population lives in big cities and on the coast; 80% of the food is imported; and the “delicious garden,” the fertile land of the Moors in the Middle Ages, is turning into dust.

“Who cares?” city people may say. “We get our food from the supermarket.”

An incident in June of this year showed how weak this argument is and how thin the layers of peace and richness in Europe might be. A strike of fuel truck drivers hit Portugal. On the second day the first gas stations had run out of gas; on the third day the first supermarkets had empty shelves; and then two people working to block some fuel trucks trying to break the strike were run over deliberately.

If this kind of thing should happen more in the future, we have to ask: What will we eat? Where will our water come from? Our electricity? How will we survive? When the last fuel has been used, these questions will not be answered by global systems, but in our neighborhoods, our communities, and through our relationship to the land we live on.

How can we save the cork oaks? Pancho, a nature walker and ecologist in Tamera, gives a surprisingly sober answer. “By healing the water balance. Water is the only sustainable solution for the trees.”

Tamera, a research center and peace university, works on peace – not only between people but with nature as well. On three-hundred-fifty acres, the ecologists of Tamera develop local solutions for global problems.

“Droughts are not a natural law,” Sepp Holzer states. This Austrian mountain farmer is one of the ecological advisors of Tamera. “They are the consequence of deforestation, monocultures, and overgrazing. After decades of wrong treatment, it´s not small steps that are needed, but bigger steps of correction.”

Sepp takes us on a tour through the growing water landscape of Tamera. In the middle of the Alentejo, where the summer has turned everything brown, where meadows are as dry as straw, we have entered a different world. Fresh green shoots are sprouting on the terraces. Fruit trees, berry bushes, and reeds are growing. The densely-growing leaves on the terraces are edible plants such as radishes, cabbage, turnips, lettuce, and old varieties of cereals which all grow here abundantly – not in straight lines and rows, but as mother nature would have sown them herself. As visitors we are allowed to eat from this abundance. This first impression of the new Tamera water landscape is convincing – and tasty.

The first lake of Tamera was started last August. It is part of a comprehensive concept for the retention and saving of the winter rain, for renaturation of the landscape, for reforestation with mixed cultures, and for food cultivation. The winter rain filled the lake; now in the hot summer season, the lake supplies the surroundings with water.

“Water is information. Water is life. Water is capital,” Sepp Holzer states. The lake is indeed a elaborated system of self purification and regulation of different temperatures. The flatter shorelines serve to clean the lake, and to grow tropical plants. Natural marble stones are standing on the shore and in some shallow parts of the lake, they are useful giants working like a tiled fireplace. At night they radiate the heat to their surroundings.

Deeper zones of the lake create the differences in temperature leading to water movements which carry oxygen into the lake and help the fish thrive and prosper.

“Edible landscapes” is a term which makes the mouths water of some participants on the walk. In many places the mixed plant cultures which were sown last year are already growing. As much as possible original species are grown – plants which will later sow their own seeds. Sepp Holzer: “In nature it is the same as with human beings: community is better than solitude.”

100,000 tons of soil were removed for the construction of this first water retention basin. The design of the lake incorporates a gently rising dam with an overflow and an outlet discharge structure that regulates the water level and makes the population of water plants and fish controllable.

Beyond its task of ecological regeneration, the water landscape can become an important economic factor. The ecologists of Tamera think that future communities will produce their own food and take care of nature. Together with the solar energy systems which are developed in Tamera, this “lakescape” is a model for decentralized sustainability in times when the supermarkets can´t take care of us any more.

Maybe this could be paradise after all.

http://www.tamera.org/

Daffodils bloom recklessly early in the south of England - ignoring the genetic advice of a million winters.

View large image

We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week (August 11 2008). At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction.

The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.

Watson's call was supported by the government's former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, who warned that "if we get to a four-degree rise it is quite possible that we would begin to see a runaway increase". This is a remarkable understatement. The climate system is already experiencing significant feedbacks, notably the summer melting of the Arctic sea ice. The more the ice melts, the more sunshine is absorbed by the sea, and the more the Arctic warms. And as the Arctic warms, the release of billions of tonnes of methane – a greenhouse gas 70 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years – captured under melting permafrost is already under way.

To see how far this process could go, look 55.5m years to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when a global temperature increase of 6C coincided with the release of about 5,000 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, both as CO2 and as methane from bogs and seabed sediments. Lush subtropical forests grew in polar regions, and sea levels rose to 100m higher than today. It appears that an initial warming pulse triggered other warming processes. Many scientists warn that this historical event may be analogous to the present: the warming caused by human emissions could propel us towards a similar hothouse Earth.

But what are we to do? All our policies to date to tackle global warming have been miserable failures. The Kyoto protocol has created a vast carbon market but done little to reduce emissions. The main effect of the EU's emissions trading scheme has been to transfer about €30bn or more from consumers to Europe's biggest polluters, the power companies. The EU and US foray into biofuels has, at huge cost, increased greenhouse gas emissions and created a world food crisis, causing starvation in many poor countries.

So are all our efforts doomed to failure? Yes, so long as our governments remain craven to special interests, whether carbon traders or fossil fuel companies. The carbon market is a valuable tool, but must be subordinate to climatic imperatives. The truth is that to prevent runaway greenhouse warming, we will have to leave most of the world's fossil fuels in the ground, especially carbon-heavy coal, oil shales and tar sands. The fossil fuel and power companies must be faced down.

Global problems need global solutions, and we also need an effective replacement for the failed Kyoto protocol. The entire Kyoto system of national allocations is obsolete because of the huge volumes of energy embodied in products traded across national boundaries. It also presents a major obstacle to any new agreement – as demonstrated by the 2008 G8 meeting in Japan that degenerated into a squabble over national emission rights.

The answer? Scrap national allocations and place a single global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, applied "upstream" – for instance, at the oil refinery, coal-washing station and cement factory. Sell permits up to that cap in a global auction, and use the proceeds to finance solutions to climate change – accelerating the use of renewable energy, raising energy efficiency, protecting forests, promoting climate-friendly farming, and researching geoengineering technologies. And commit hundreds of billions of dollars per year to finance adaptation to climate change, especially in poor countries.

Such a package of measures would allow us to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and long-term stabilisation at 350 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. This avoids the economic pain that a cap-and-trade system alone would cause, and targets assistance at the poor, who are least to blame and most need help. The permit auction would raise about $1 trillion per year, enough to finance a spread of solutions. At a quarter of the world's annual oil spending, it is a price well worth paying.

Originally published in the Guardian, used here with permission of the author. More information on Oliver Tickell's book Kyoto2 can be found at kyoto2.org

According to the Conservation of Energy Principle, we can neither create nor destroy energy. This means we will always have as much energy as we ever had. So, how can we experience an energy crisis?

Our crisis develops from another law of energy: The Entropy Law. It states that energy use always results in some overall loss of availability, quality, or order. Physics characterizes such loss as an increase of entropy. This is where informed energy discussions begin.

The inevitable increase of entropy seems to have a slightly different character for each system under consideration. For example, heat always flows from the hotter to the colder body, never the reverse. Perfume molecules escape their container and spread throughout the room, but never gather back into the bottle of their own accord.

While heat is flowing, or perfume molecules are spreading, they can do work—they are useful. Even after heat flows down its temperature hill, or the molecules spread out in a room, overall energy remains constant, but that energy is now unavailable for use--no good for doing work.

Entropy applies thermally, structurally, and environmentally. Just as a weight cannot supply any mechanical work once it reaches its lowest available level, thermal energy is not available for use after it falls to an ambient temperature. It simply becomes ‘waste’ heat, like car exhaust. Entropic disorder is commonly termed pollution.

There are various mathematical expressions for Entropy, such as S = k ln W (where k is a constant and W is the microstates per macrostate). Due to its broad, complex, and abstract formulations, some have rejected the Entropy Law—even deemed it an illegitimate natural principle because too ‘anthropomorphic’ (as if scientific laws had any other origin). Einstein, however, thought the Entropy Law was the one law that would never be overthrown.

Some have said that life transcends the Entropy Law, but no contradiction exists since the overall Entropy increase (system plus surroundings) still exceeds the entropy decrease of a structuring organism.

By extension of the Entropy Law, matter also becomes unavailable for use. High entropy copper junk (because dispersed in refuse dumps) can be too costly to recycle, both monetarily and environmentally, thus practically unavailable. Entropy’s economic decrements are developing beyond the control of today’s price mechanisms.

From an entropy perspective, economic growth is the progressive transformation of usable energy into unavailable energy. This means an overall decline in our environment—except that the sun’s outside gift of energy may compensate for this decline by driving the earth’s large-scale regenerative cycles (carbon, oxygen, etc). The sun’s finite input, however, can only compensate if economic activity’s entropy production is not too large.

All large-scale technical fixes such as ‘clean’ coal, nuclear, or corn-ethanol create quality (entropy) issues. Energy from coal results in acid rain, global warming, methyl mercury in food chains, and toxic, congesting particles in the air we breathe. Nuclear plants create radioactive waste in direct proportion to the energy produced—some of which (Plutonium 40) requires environmental isolation for hundreds of thousands of years. Nuclear decommissioning costs billions. Corn-ethanol production emits two to nine times the greenhouse gas emissions ‘saved’ by substituting it for gasoline.

Because of the high environmental costs we pay for creating high-quality (low entropy) energies such as electricity or hydrogen fuel, we should use them only where their quality is truly necessary. Coal-electric space heating and plug-in cars remain prohibitive.

The Entropy Law sets limits to the types of energy use humans can sustain. Since all earth-energized technological orderings result in an overall loss of order (even for pollution control devices and recycling), entropy compensating sources of energy must be external. Practically, this means the sun. Non-solar energy solutions become ‘uneconomic’ (if not snake oil) once price mechanisms factor in their entropy effects.

We can choose to assess and respect the Entropy Law’s implications, or we can continue to make energy policy in ignorance. A mix increasingly weighted toward low entropy solar applications is finally unavoidable. Reversible entropy is not merely a tree-hugger’s fancy; it is an ecological necessity.

For many energy applications, we have yet to determine the form, let alone the cost, of their attendant entropy (disordering). In the very big picture, however, specific calculations (the details) don’t matter. According to the entropy law, we either go (relatively direct) solar or decline.

A mathematical interpretation follows: The Entropy Law (Second Law of Thermodynamics) when applied to an overall system undergoing an irreversible (practical) energy exchange and consisting of a subsystem of interest in equilibrium with its surroundings is expressed mathematically as

dS(overall) = dS(subsystem) dS(surroundings) > 0

where dS is the attendant change in entropy.

The surroundings are taken large enough to form an unlimited reservoir. Thus, equilibrium is maintained with the system of interest. The above mathematical inequality states that the overall, proximate change in entropy (subsystem plus surroundings taken together) for any practical energy exchange is always positive. In other words, all earth-alone energy exchanges result in a net disorder.

Should external (solar) energy enter the overall system, the mathematical inequality may no longer hold. The net entropy can be zero or even negative. In other words, inputs of solar energy can compensate the otherwise inevitable entropy increases of our energy exchanges.

Here are a few examples of how an entropy-oriented analysis might expeditiously cull out technological proposals.

Aren’t hydrogen-fueled cars ‘ecological’ since they emit only pure water? An entropy analysis cuts immediately to whether a solar component is involved. If no solar component exists to negate the entropy that attends hydrogen production, storage, and handling, the overall effect is ecological degradation. Note the economy of approach here. An entropy analysis doesn’t need to show precisely how the degradation manifests to declare it unecological.

‘Clean’ coal combustion is similarly dismissible. If coal’s CO2 (greenhouse) by-product could be dumped (‘sequestered’) without ecological consequences, the entropy law would be violated thereby making the whole science of thermodynamics incomprehensible.

Isn’t nature’s geothermal energy, if unused, simply wasted? This question is superficial because it deals only with energy. The relevant question is: Does geothermal have entropy negation (a solar component)? If not, it is unecological. From an entropy perspective, we don’t need to employ a team of engineers to investigate whether geothermal’s accelerated cooling of magma releases ‘too much’ CO2 to sequester. CO2 waste dumps aren’t ecological. If an energy project is purely earth-derived (no solar negation), it provides no ecological solution.

Of course, minor solar entropy compensations soon wash out among infrastructure, transportation, and other supporting technologies. This means our solar applications must be relatively direct (wind, solar panels/concentrators, possibly hydro, etc.).

Some may still cling to the idea of ‘affordable decline’. But keep in mind, most entropy effects ultimately manifest as waste heat. Here, we are up against our ecological limits. Global warming makes this abundantly clear. We can no longer settle for lesser evils.

Summing up, our only practical means of negating technology’s inevitable entropy (eco-degradation) is solar incorporation. No solar, no sustainability, no ecological solution. Go solar or decline!

Amongst scientists, James Hansen has long been one of the clearest voices for strong action against climate change. Yet now he advocates replacing coal with wood from vast tree plantations, burning the wood and capturing and sequestering the carbon dioxide. He also supports the idea that we should burn vast amounts of biomass in order to gain energy as well as charcoal in the hope that digging the charcoal into the soil will permanently sequester the carbon and make the soil more fertile, a concept known as 'biochar'.

It is deeply concerning that such ecologically short-sighted proposals come from a man who rightly warns that we are already 'beyond safe levels' of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. It is understandable that he and other scientists are looking at ways of reducing the fast increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations. Unfortunately, most of the proposals put forward for 'cooling the planet' involve either using vast amounts of energy for still unproven technologies (air capture of CO2) or, even more worryingly, sacrificing biodiversity and ecosystems.

Scientists who have developed the idea of using biomass power plants with carbon capture and storage, or biomass burning with biochar production in order to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, have made it clear that at least 500 million hectares of plantations would be required, which is over one and a half times the size of India. Those would be primarily industrial plantations of fast-growing trees and grasses. Some suggest that 'biomass waste' could be used for this purpose, however natural systems produce no 'waste' and removing agricultural and forest residues from land causes major carbon dioxide emissions, loss of biodiversity as well as soil depletion and erosion.

The idea of biochar is based on ancient soils found in Central Amazonia, called 'terra preta'. Those are believed to have been created over very long periods by farming communities in pre-colonial times, who applied a mixture of charcoal, human waste and compost from diverse plants and animal remains to the soil. Terra preta soil is high in carbon and extremely fertile but there is no conclusive evidence that it can be reproduced on a short time-scale, using industrial, rather than locally adapted biodiverse farming methods. One of the lessons from the 'Green Revolution' is that any 'one size fits all' approach to agriculture has dangerous and unpredictable consequences.

Indigenous peoples and farming communities have, over thousands of years, developed crop and livestock varieties, soil conservation methods and sustainable farming methods which are adapted to local soil conditions, plant and animal species and climate. Biochar, on the other hand, is being developed by a small group of scientists together with bioenergy companies which are already patenting the process and which hope to sell biochar as a global response to climate change and to profit from carbon trading. Regardless of whether biochar may or may not make soil more fertile on a small-scale, covering hundreds of millions of hectares with 'energy crops' for this purpose would have devastating impacts on climate, soil, freshwater, biodiversity and people.

September's unprecedented plantation forest fires across South Africa provide a glimpse of a possible future where vast industrial tree plantations combine with global warming. Monoculture plantations dry up the land and are prone to fires and global warming fans the flames by exacerbating droughts and heatwaves. This appears to be yet another instance where large-scale bioenergy proposals are hastily being made that "reshape the Earth's landscape in a significant way" without reference to long-term unintended consequences.

Hansen's proposals would increase the scale of today's monocultures for biofuels at least 20-25 fold. Small farmers, indigenous peoples and forest communities, who are already suffering most from the impacts of climate change, would undoubtedly be the first to pay the price for 'carbon negative' bioenergy through the loss of their land and livelihoods. As we know from the experience with current biofuels, expanding monocultures is one of the quickest ways of making climate change worse.

Industrial monocultures (crops and trees) are the main cause of tropical deforestation and emit further vast amounts of greenhouse gases through agro-chemical use and soil erosion. By releasing large quantities of carbon from vegetation and soil and destroying biodiverse ecosystems, monoculture expansion ensures that key ecosystem functions such as the regulation of rainfall cycles, and the carbon and the nitrogen cycles, collapse. Already, there are 100 million hectares of industrial tree plantations, largely serving the pulp and paper industry, which have replaced natural ecosystems, including old growth forests as well as fertile farmland and pasture. They have decimated biodiversity, depleted groundwater, polluted large areas of land through agrichemical use, and eroded soil and destroyed the livelihoods of large numbers of people.

Clearly, we cannot grow enough biomass to replace more than a small fraction of the fossil fuels burnt at present, and further expansion of tree and crop monocultures will ensure there will be no stable climate and no habitable planet. Rural communities in many parts of the world have found ways of growing, harvesting and using biomass sustainably to meet their own energy needs, but if we try to replace a significant proportion of fossil fuel use with biomass we risk greatly accelerating climate change and triggering ecosystem collapse. Large-scale bioenergy plantations are therefore not an alternative to coal burning and will not remove excess atmospheric CO2.

What we need is massive demand reduction by the wealthy together with truly sustainable wind and solar and other types of renewable energy. Throughout the planet's history, biodiverse ecosystems have stabilised the planet's climate. Rather than sacrificing them for bioenergy, truly effective protection and regeneration of ecosystems, based on diversity and resilience, offers our only hope of survival.

http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/

Sometimes, when I survey the forces deployed against us it seems a little depressing. But now that the mighty army of the righteous has been swelled by the Women's Institute, ramblers and surfers, the task doesn't seem so daunting. Even the Dark Lord Drax is coming to our aid.

View large image

Wonder why the world is going to hell in a hand-basket? It could be a memory problem—not something we have forgotten, but rather, something we are failing to remember.

The tiny ant has no memory problem. Like all other insects, it knows a lot, even without being taught. It comes into this world, and, as if by magic, knows how to build a nest, gather food, reproduce, communicate with other ants, and many other things necessary for survival.

The ant’s behaviour is hard-wired into its brain, an organ about the size of a pin head. Everything the little creature needs to know has been passed down genetically from generation to generation over tens of millions of years.

Humans, although lacking the instincts of an ant, have a brain thousands of times larger and a history on the Earth just about as long (if you include our primate years). There is little doubt that we, too, have ancient memories, and, given the size of our brain, vastly more knowledge than the ant.

Sigmund Freud, using the famous iceberg metaphor, was the first to posit the theory that humans are about 10% conscious (above the surface) and 90% unconscious (below the surface). Karl Jung went further by identifying a collective unconscious, a gene pool containing all the thoughts, memories, and experiences of every human who has ever lived. He developed his theory in part by observing that people from different cultures, who have never met, often have the same dreams.

Thanks to Freud and Jung, there was now a world of the subconscious to explore, a world of dreams, intuition and irrationality. It became a wonderful mine for painters, poets, musicians and other artists. Dylan Thomas, whose lyrics are among the most powerful and captivating in modern poetry, acknowledged his debt to Freud, saying it was the poet’s challenge to drag as much as possible from the subconscious “into the clear nakedness of light.”

It is well known that most of the world’s great music arises from the subconscious. Beethoven’s masterpieces, for example, are often recognized as having a primeval quality that echoes the beginning of man’s existence. More recent examples include Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, a rock opera with a haunting quality that touches something deep and timeless in the listener and continues to attract millions of hits on youtube.

What artists have in common is an ability to summon images, emotions and rhythms from distant epochs when man lived in close-knit social groups, struggled daily for survival, and had direct contact with the forces of nature. In other words, the greatest art comes from the Earth itself, and its power is due to the fact that it resonates with something deep in the subconscious. We appreciate the music of the universe because we recognize it in ourselves.

But artists are not the only ones who plumb the depths of the human psyche. Ecologists, particularly those involved in deep ecology, believe nothing is more important than emotions and the subconscious when it comes to our interaction with nature. Reason can help explain some of the intricacies of the natural world, but it tends to reduce complex, living systems to the level of machines, and, worst of all, portray the web of life as a “natural resource” that exists for human consumption. This type of anthropocentrism or human-centeredness is seen as the root cause of today’s environmental crisis.

In deep ecology, ecosystems are regarded as having intrinsic rather than economic value. Nature becomes the focus of one’s deepest spiritual feelings, and environmental destruction strikes like a blow to the core of one’s being. Humans do, of course, need raw materials to live, but these must be extracted with love, compassion and intelligence so ecosystems remain healthy and intact.

Scientists have only just begun to identify the incredible complexity and interconnectedness of Earth’s living systems. Some even suspect the Earth is a self-regulating organism that strives to maintain a stable condition hospitable to life forms, including humans.

Unfortunately, the sacred balance is being upset as man continues his consumer binge and dead zones spread across the surface of the globe. We destroy even before we understand what is being destroyed. But that is only partly true, for we really do understand, if not objectively and rationally, then intuitively and emotionally.

If we want to stop the destruction, we must first reach far back within ourselves to our biological origins. In the deep recesses of our subconscious we will discover what we have known all along—that the ultimate mystery of life is impenetrable, and always will be. We will also recall, with awe and humility, our place in nature, and perhaps start thinking how we can save this miracle planet—our one and only home and the closest thing to paradise we shall ever see.

Frants Attorp is an educator and environmental writer who lives in Victoria.

Imagine a hospital bed. You’re lying on it, dying. A machine’s high-pitched alarm squeals somewhere in the background. Your heart has stopped; strangers bark commands as they work on your body. These sounds are fading. This is your last second here in this life. What moment will you spend your final thought on, what activity will you miss with all your heart?

Reading a story to your child nestled in your lap? A lazy Sunday afternoon joking with friends? Falling asleep in the arms of your true love?

Don’t worry; you’re still far from that hospital bed. But make a list today of those activities, those contestants for your final thought. Work on the list, tuck it into your wallet. Remember to take it out regularly and look at it.

•

Think about a single white blood cell. Pick this one, for instance, coasting down the radial artery in your right arm now. Do you think it has any concept about the existence of you, the whole of you? Your hopes and dreams and your search through the fridge for something good to eat? Do you think it has any idea that its work helps your life to continue?

No, that white blood cell is simply cruising through the warm blood, happily searching out viruses. No existential angst about the big picture here. It’s doing this work because it’s hungry and those alien viruses taste great. It’s in the moment, busy in its life.

•

The cougar waits. She’s crouched on a branch in a cottonwood tree beside the river. She’s waiting for a deer to walk down the path for a drink of water. The tip of her tail twitches.

If she were shot or scared permanently from the area, deer would come to the riverbank in greater and greater numbers, chewing cottonwood saplings down to nubs. Without predation, the deer would reproduce quickly, chomping through shrubbery and grasses. The plant roots holding onto the topsoil die, starting erosion. Within a few years there are so many deer, hungry, gnawing the bark off the grown trees, clambering down into the river to eat even the wetland plants, their sharp hooves cutting into the riverbank, muddying the water for all.

However, for now at least, the cougar is here. In the sun-dappled shade, you can barely see her, but her presence is easy to guess from the thick foliage around her. Scientists call this, ‘the Ecology of Fear.’ Along riverbanks where cougars live, researchers have found 50 times more cottonwoods than on riverbanks without cougars. So many trees mean more amphibians and wildflowers, lizards and butterflies. The entire system richer.

She waits on the branch. Her pale eyes intent, her strong body waiting. She is doing what feels good, what her body tells her to do.

•

Think of a peach. A ripe peach. Press your nose against that fuzzy skin and smell its sweetness. You take a bite of its flesh. Even though you’re trying to figure out how to get your car to the repair shop without being late for work, you still note the taste of the peach, feel a shiver of enjoyment.

When finished, you toss the pit to the side. For the peach tree, that toss is actually the point, that walk you made, 80 feet from the tree, the way the pit landed on soil. The tree can’t lob its seeds onto fresh soil to grow. All it can do is offer a little sweetness as a bribe for you to do it.

You, white blood cell, you.

•

You’re floating in outer space, wearing a lab coat. You’re as big as the sun. In front of you is a twinkling blue-green planet, what appears to be some sort of growth smeared like a skin around the hard rock. Lean down and cut a microscopic cross-section off the growth’s skin. Under your microscope, these cells –such differing sizes and shapes; oak trees and oysters and caribou-- become transparent silhouettes dotted with the blobs of organs inside each membrane.

Looking at each cell, you think only in terms of overall purpose, how it helps the planetary organism survive, just as you would when staring at a lung cell or brain cell. You don’t imagine individual struggles. You think this cell makes oxygen or this cell cleans the water or this one enriches the soil.

Collectively let’s call this uber-body not Gaia (such a cold distancing name). Let’s call it Janet.

•

Salmon are one of the few cells Janet has that can pump the protein created in the oceans back into the forest. There’ve been studies showing without Pacific salmon swimming far upriver to die by the tonnage --their flesh feeding both local carnivores and the soil-- everything from the bears to the redwoods decline. Just as you require white blood cells, Janet requires this pumping of protein.

Imagine the pleasure of biting into a peach; magnify it. Imagine the drive to have sex; magnify it. For a salmon, the action of swimming upstream, beating its body to death on rocks along the way, must be sprinkled somehow with such intense pleasure that overall it feels better than anything else, including just floating lazily in the water, its heart continuing to beat for a few weeks longer.

Having had kids, I can imagine the pleasure of that exhaustion. When my youngest screams out in the middle of the night, I bolt out of bed, my head befuddled, my heart slamming in my chest. This part, this part is pain. Still I run to him, scoop his little body tight to mine, feel him comforted. Feel myself comforted. Oxytocin –the hormone of love and attachment-- pumping through my blood. The pleasure is intense.

•

The scientists are beginning to look at Janet as a whole, to discuss her in their dry roundabout way. They’ve begun to step past their exclusive obsession with Darwin as he observes a single finch, writing his careful notes about competition. Raising their eyes to include the forest and sky and water beyond, they’re starting to study the interrelated system. They’ve come up with all sorts of new terminology: biogeochemistry, carbon cycling, trophic interactions. They discuss biological pumps moving nutrients around. Walking it, swimming it, flying it to where it needs to go.

That same basic research with cougars has been repeated with elephants, wolves, spiders and others. Without each of these species, the diversity and/or number of surrounding plants have decreased, the system as a whole less successful.

For after all, plants are the point. They are Janet’s stomach. Plants suck energy into the system, knit sunlight and carbon dioxide into flesh. Every cell in your body as well as everything on your dinner plate is made from that carbon, manufactured originally by plants. Every breath you take, every biological movement you’ve ever seen –from a parrot’s yawn to an amoeba’s creep-- is parasitized off plants. The energy they captured in the form of flesh just gets passed from life-form to life-form. The cow eats the grass, the human eats the cow, bacteria eat the human.

The more plants there are, the better we’re all doing. The more carbon they suck out of the atmosphere, the more energy there is in the system, the more elephants and geckos and fungi there are, the more Janet. Forget that religion term-paper you struggled with in college, those late-night insomnia episodes where you wondered if your dad was right and you should have been a dentist. Let your eyes drift past the cougar on the branch, to survey the thick trees all around her, the butterflies flapping past, the birds calling. This is the point.

This is why we humans love eating watermelons and raspberries, spitting the seeds far and wide or depositing them the next day in a steaming pile of rich compost.

Well, at least that’s how we used to deposit them, until we invented the concept and mechanisms of waste, something so alien to Janet. The watermelon seeds get spat now onto a plate, then scraped into an impermeable plastic bag. The raspberry seeds that miraculously survive our intestines drown in the giant vat of a sewage treatment plant.

Fascinated with our own inventiveness, we’ve forgotten the point of life.

•

Looking at your car, normally you see a vehicle to get you to your meeting on time and to pick up your groceries. You notice the detailing and that scratch on the fender.

Examine it from Janet’s point of view. She looks at this car and sees nothing but a motor to pump out carbon.

Out the tailpipe what we are emitting is the life force, unknitting the carbon fabric, doing the reverse of what Janet has been working toward for three billion years now. We are transferring Janet’s stored biological energy into atmospheric energy: rising wind and drought. The scientists know the more CO2 there is in the air, the less life can exist on the planet. Carrying capacity, they call it. Pressing down on the gas pedal, we are squeezing the life out of polar bears and plankton in order to create more Hurricane Katrinas.

•

I have a compost heap. Creating compost takes time. It’s not the simplest thing. I have to dump the food waste in the kitchen container, then when it’s full, take it outside and throw it on the heap. During the summer, the container attracts fruit flies no matter how often I wash it. Still, I get pleasure in turning the compost. I dig the pitchfork in, feel my shoulders creak. There’s the rich smell of earth, the sudden clumps of earthworms. If I’d dumped all this waste into a garbage bag, it would decompose without air, the anaerobic bacteria creating methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Instead I am knitting that carbon into earth, creating hundreds of pounds of rich soil each year, something that helps plants grow. Pushing a wheelbarrow full of this life, this carbon, out into my garden and spreading it around, raking Janet back into the ground, I hum to myself, feel the warm sun on my face.

•

Remember that list of what you might think about in your final moment before you die. You are far from that hospital bed, still very much alive, but you are harried and tired by modern human life, don’t have time to eat well or exercise, much less hang with friends. Your child needs braces; your boss has mentioned downsizing. Your doctor is concerned about your last check-up. His voice is low and serious.

It’s so easy to misplace the list. After a while you aren’t even sure when you last saw it.

•

Given the way our society currently functions --the vast population, the lifestyle props we believe our happiness depends on-- it’s hard to imagine what role humanity should have on the planet and how to move toward it. This is the knotty problem we all need to start to figure out. Now.

I can tell you the first few steps. We have to stop the frantic motor of our lives. Step out of the car onto the soil. Smell the air. Eat a peach. Taste its sweetness, jolts of Janet’s happiness zipping through our brains and hearts. Toss the pit onto some rich-looking earth. Toss thousands of seeds out there, millions. Watch the plants grow, eating carbon. Knitting life and our happiness back together.

PRESS/SOCIAL MEDIA RELEASE

Ecological Internet's latest offering focuses upon truthfully knowing global ecological crises in order to effectively develop and implement ecologically sufficient solutions

By Earth's Newsdesk, a project of Ecological Internet
CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry, glenbarry@ecologicalinternet.org

(Seattle, WA) -- Ecological Internet, the world's leading provider of on-line environmental portals and action opportunities, is pleased to announce New Earth Rising, a new fiercely biocentric online magazine (e-zine), committed to thought and action to achieve global ecological sustainability. The green publication launches today at http://www.newearthrising.org/ and free subscriptions can be made at http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/subscribe/ .

The inaugural issue, entitled Ecological Truth and Transformative Action, features original and diverse green essays that seek to more fully know Earth's crises -- including climate change, water scarcity and forest diminishment -- in order to achieve ecologically sufficient solutions. New Earth Rising links what is known regarding global ecological crises with specific personal and social transformations necessary for shared survival and to sustain being.

PRESS/SOCIAL MEDIA RELEASE

Cursory review of FSC's controversial certifications completely fails to question false premise that primary and old-growth forest logging is ever "well-managed", instead calling for better training manuals for ancient forest destruction

By Earth's Newsdesk, a project of Ecological Internet
CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry, glenbarry@ecologicalinternet.org

(Seattle, WA) -- Today Greenpeace International released a report entitled "Holding the Line with FSC"[1] which reaffirms Greenpeace's unflinching support for the Forest Stewardship Council's (FSC) [search] past and on-ongoing industrial first-time logging of hundreds of millions of hectares of primary and old-growth forests. Greenpeace and other "forest protection" groups like the Rainforest Action Network and WWF continue to provide crucial greenwash for the false premise that ancient forest logging [search] is desirable and can ever be considered "well-managed".

Greenpeace was the target of a series of protests in 2007 led by Ecological Internet, as Greenpeace held FSC's international chairmanship, regarding their continued support for ancient forest logging given widespread irregularities. At that time they agreed to review problematic FSC certifications, and to respond to criticism regarding FSC's dependence upon ancient forest logging. Their new report fails miserably on both counts.

Arctic melting leading to methane release [ark | more\ark] -- a major climate change feedback -- has kicked in again after an eight year hiatus, indicating a major quickening of the climate crisis. A global study in Geophysical Research Letters found a major increase in methane levels of about 28 million tonnes since mid-2006 due to release of gas in and near the Arctic. Methane is responsible for some 20% of global warming -- and Arctic warming is melting permafrost, leading to increased bacterial emissions from wetland areas. Indications are frozen methane clathrates found on the ocean floors [search] are also melting .The finding comes as research published in Nature Geoscience found solid evidence that temperatures are rising in Antarctica [ark] as well, and that climate change there and in the Arctic was conclusively caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gas.

Humanity is at a dramatic juncture. We can continue careening wildly towards global ecological collapse including abandoning collapsed ecosystems [ark], with token feel-good efforts to appear like we are doing something, or we can commit immediately to dramatic ecologically sufficient policy responses. These include rigorous voluntary incentives to reduce human population [search] and consumption [search], immediately ending ancient forest logging [search] and coal use [search], urgently embracing energy efficiency [search], conservation [search] and renewable energy [search], and fully protecting remaining intact ecosystems while beginning the ecological restoration of entire regions [search].