from Root Force
Power lines downed by Hurricane Sandy (Photo: Arlington County/cc/flickr)
The combination of fracking and global warming-driven drought is placing an increasing strain on U.S. energy infrastructure, which depends on water for cooling power plants, the Department of Energy has warned. And that’s not all.
In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended a protest at a federal auction of drilling rights to Utah wilderness lands. He found a better way to disrupt the auction when he picked up a paddle and began bidding on the leases as “Bidder 70.” He won $1.8 million worth of parcels and inflated the price of many others. When it was discovered that he had no money to back his bids, the auction had to be shut down.
Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for his actions, but his boldness stopped the sale of 22,000 acres of scenic wilderness and highlighted government misconduct. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar scrapped a rescheduled auction because the Bureau of Land Management had skimped on its environmental analysis and inadequately consulted with the National Park Service. In January 2013, a federal court denied an energy industry appeal to reinstate the leases. DeChristopher was released from prison in April. Photos by David Newkirk
Feeling anxious about life in a broken-down society on a stressed-out planet? That’s hardly surprising: Life as we know it is almost over. While the dominant culture encourages dysfunctional denial—pop a pill, go shopping, find your bliss—there’s a more sensible approach: Accept the anxiety, embrace the deeper anguish—and then get apocalyptic.
We are staring down multiple cascading ecological crises, struggling with political and economic institutions that are unable even to acknowledge, let alone cope with, the threats to the human family and the larger living world. We are intensifying an assault on the ecosystems in which we live, undermining the ability of that living world to sustain a large-scale human presence into the future. When all the world darkens, looking on the bright side is not a virtue but a sign of irrationality. Continue reading
by Jeremy Miller / Earth Island
In August 1872, a 34-year-old John Muir climbed the snow and ice of Mount Lyell and Mount Maclure into the highest reaches of what is today Yosemite National Park. The journey to the high country was no pleasure trip, but an expedition intended to resolve a bitter scientific dispute. The climb, chronicled in “The Living Glaciers of California,” published in the November 1875 issue of Harper’s Magazine, would hold great geological significance as Muir gathered evidence for the formation of the Sierra Nevada’s distinctive granite valleys.
At the time, no one had collected any evidence to suggest that the permanent ice and snowfields in the Sierra’s high basins were “living” glaciers. Muir believed they were. He posited that in a distant, colder past, these small glaciers once ran like great rivers of ice, carving the granite canyons of the western Sierra, including the majestic defile of Yosemite Valley itself.
by John Atcheson, Cross Posted from Common Dreams
OK, lemmings don’t commit mass suicide. But they do reproduce chaotically, and periodically consume their way out of sustainable habitats, and into mass migrations that result in most of their population dying.
Sound familiar? We’re cavalierly headed for our own cliff – 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere sometime in the next couple of months, if not sooner.
The lemming has a brain the size of a pea. What’s our excuse?
from the Economic Times
BEIJING: About 90 per cent of glaciers in Tibet called the Third Pole region, are shrinking because of black carbon pollution “transferred from South Asia” to the Tibetan Plateau, a Chinese scientist has warned.
The Third Pole region, which is centred on the Tibetan Plateau and concerns the interests of the surrounding countries and regions, covers more than five million square kilometres and has an average altitude of more than 4,000 metres. Continue reading
by Russ McSpadden / Earth First! News
[The text of this work is free to share and distribute under the following Creative Commons License CC-BY-ND 3.0]
Department of Defense
The U.S. has a growing corps of cyber-warriors and drone pilots who target human populations with bomb strapped drones. Now the Pentagon is commending their all-too-real virtual combat with a new medal.
Last month, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta approved the military’s first new combat medal in nearly a century. The Distinguished Warfare Medal is bestowed to individuals in recognition of “extraordinary contributions” to combat operations conducted from afar.
In the military hierarchy of honor, the new ‘lethal gamer’ medal is the eighth highest award behind the Medal of Honor.
Some are calling it the “Chair-borne Medal,” “the Nintendo Medal,” “the Purple Buttocks,” and the “Distant Warfare Medal,” demeaning the computer-based iWarriors because they are not exposed to imminent mortal danger like traditional combat soldiers. A growing alliance of veterans groups and politicians are lobbying the Pentagon and President Obama to downgrade the award, which is ahead of the Bronze Star and Purple Heart in terms of distinction.
Regardless of the kerfuffle over the proper accolades for the military’s deadly computer nerd-core, little argument has been put forward questioning the ethics of bestowing an honorary trinket on a group of techno-assassins that spy on and bomb suspected terrorists, American citizens, wedding parties and children from the comfort of a computer screen.
Read more on techno-monstrosities in McSpadden’s “The Early History of the Robot Wars” Part 1 and Part 2
By now, all you current and former subscribers to the EF! Journal should have seen our 2013 Winter update letter in the mail. For those who have sent back donations, we offer our full gratitude for your commitment to sustaining the media of the eco-resistance.
For those still sitting on the letters twiddling your thumbs, we ask that if you can afford a donation of any amount, please get them in the mail to us soon, before they are totally buried under the mounds of junk mail from whack NGOs with their glossy polar bear pictures who are trying to capitalize off your christmas gift money…
And for those who didn’t see it in the mail, you can subscribe to the Journal right here and now, so you’ll never miss another riveting letter from us again. In the meantime, the text from the letter is below. Also, you can print out the whole thing to make copies and give ’em to all your friends by clicking on the image to the right.
Yule Season’s Greetings To All You Eco-Defenders
And Earth First! Journal Supporters
It’s been a long, hard year here at the Earth First! Journal office. Despite financial pressures in conjunction with lots of court dates, once again, we have persisted.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Dec. 24 (UPI) — The western portion of Antarctica is warming twice as fast as previously thought and triple the world’s average temperature rise, U.S. scientists say.
The temperature in the center of western Antarctica, about 700 miles from the South Pole, has risen 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958, making that area one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth, the researchers wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
A 2009 measurement considered authoritative had indicated that part of the continent, which resembles a giant peninsula stretching roughly from the South Pole toward the southern tip of South America, had warmed just 2.2 degrees since 1957. Continue reading
Considered by many to have an intelligence that rivals humankind’s and otherworldly transformative evolution powers, the cuttlefish is among creatures slated for death in a sudden mass extinction of the worlds’ oceans.
Teetering on the dire precipice between existence and annihilation, time is running out for the Royal Bengal tiger, the Great White shark, and Victorian koalas.
There are reports that species in Brazil’s coastal rainforest are disappearing faster than scientists can keep track of them. This is owed in part to the ripple effect of extinction, creatures toppling off the planet in a chain reaction.
But perhaps the most brutal and rapid decline is coming for the world’s oceans, with scientists predicting a cataclysmic period of mass extinction currently upon us, the ramifications for which will in turn be our own demise. From 1900-2010, freshwater fish species in North America went extinct at a rate 877 times faster than the rate found in the fossil record, while estimates indicate the rate may double between now and 2050.
Plastic, clothing fibers and CO2 are not the only things ending up the sea. So is caffeine.
Scientists at Portland State University and Washington State University, Vancouver, found caffeine concentrations off the coast of Oregon. To their surprise, the substance was not always concentrated around population centers or pollution sources. In fact, they found coffee contamination in wilder areas, likely because wastewater-treatment plants have to adhere to higher standards than septic systems. They also discovered that caffeine levels spiked after storm-caused sewer overflows.
Since the Pacific Northwest has no sources of naturally occurring caffeine, its presence in coastal waters shows that waste from human sources is leaching into the sea. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of the project’s funders, said in a news release: “The presence of caffeine in ocean water may also signal additional pollution such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals.”
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