Economics 101 and Ecological Collapse
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/economics-101-and-ecological-collapse
Via the Economics of Happiness Blog.
“The collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” – David Attenborough
Today’s economics, especially...
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman goes viral after challenging Davos panel to talk about taxing the wealthy - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
▻https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-31/dutch-historian-rutger-bregman-goes-viral-after-davos-tax-speech/10766504
“This is my first time at Davos and I find it quite a bewildering experience to be honest,” he said.
"I mean, 1,500 private jets flown in to hear David Attenborough speak about how we’re wrecking the planet.
"I hear people talking the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency.
"But then almost no-one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right, and of the rich just not paying their fair share.
“It feels like I’m at a firefighters’ conference and no-one’s allowed to speak about water.”
’All the rest is bullsh*t’
David Attenborough : l’effondrement de notre civilisation est à l’horizon.
▻https://www.les-crises.fr/david-attenborough-leffondrement-de-notre-civilisation-est-a-lhorizon
We won’t save the Earth with a better kind of disposable coffee cup
We must challenge the corporations that urge us to live in a throwaway society rather than seeking ‘greener’ ways of maintaining the status quo.
Do you believe in miracles? If so, please form an orderly queue. Plenty of people imagine we can carry on as we are, as long as we substitute one material for another. Last month, a request to Starbucks and Costa to replace their plastic coffee cups with cups made from corn starch was retweeted 60,000 times, before it was deleted.
Those who supported this call failed to ask themselves where the corn starch would come from, how much land would be needed to grow it, or how much food production it would displace. They overlooked the damage this cultivation would inflict: growing corn (maize) is notorious for causing soil erosion, and often requires heavy doses of pesticides and fertilisers.
The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability. Or, to put it another way, the problem is pursuing, on the one planet known to harbour life, a four-planet lifestyle. Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth’s living systems.
Retailers likely to face backlash for failing to curb plastic use, survey finds
Don’t get me wrong. Our greed for plastic is a major environmental blight, and the campaigns to limit its use are well motivated and sometimes effective. But we cannot address our environmental crisis by swapping one overused resource for another. When I challenged that call, some people asked me, “So what should we use instead?”
The right question is, “How should we live?” But systemic thinking is an endangered species.
Part of the problem is the source of the plastic campaigns: David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series. The first six episodes had strong, coherent narratives but the seventh, which sought to explain the threats facing the wonderful creatures the series revealed, darted from one issue to another. We were told we could “do something” about the destruction of ocean life. We were not told what. There was no explanation of why the problems are happening and what forces are responsible, or how they can be engaged.
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Amid the general incoherence, one contributor stated: “It comes down, I think, to us each taking responsibility for the personal choices in our everyday lives. That’s all any of us can be expected to do.” This perfectly represents the mistaken belief that a better form of consumerism will save the planet. The problems we face are structural: a political system captured by commercial interests, and an economic system that seeks endless growth. Of course we should try to minimise our own impacts, but we cannot confront these forces merely by “taking responsibility” for what we consume. Unfortunately, these are issues that the BBC in general and David Attenborough in particular avoid. I admire Attenborough in many ways, but I am no fan of his environmentalism. For many years, it was almost undetectable. When he did at last speak out, he avoided challenging power – either speaking in vague terms or focusing on problems for which powerful interests are not responsible. This tendency may explain Blue Planet’s skirting of the obvious issues.
The most obvious is the fishing industry, which turns the astonishing life forms the rest of the series depicted into seafood. Throughout the oceans, this industry, driven by our appetites and protected by governments, is causing cascading ecological collapse. Yet the only fishery the programme featured was among the 1% that are in recovery. It was charming to see how Norwegian herring boats seek to avoid killing orcas, but we were given no idea of how unusual it is.
Even marine plastic is in large part a fishing issue. It turns out that 46% of the Great Pacific garbage patch – which has come to symbolise our throwaway society – is composed of discarded nets, and much of the rest consists of other kinds of fishing gear. Abandoned fishing materials tend to be far more dangerous to marine life than other forms of waste. As for the bags and bottles contributing to the disaster, the great majority arise in poorer nations without good disposal systems. But because this point was not made, we look to the wrong places for solutions.
From this misdirection arise a thousand perversities. One prominent environmentalist posted a picture of the king prawns she had bought, celebrating the fact that she had persuaded the supermarket to put them in her own container rather than a plastic bag, and linking this to the protection of the seas. But buying prawns causes many times more damage to marine life than any plastic in which they are wrapped. Prawn fishing has the highest rates of bycatch of any fishery – scooping up vast numbers of turtles and other threatened species. Prawn farming is just as bad, eliminating tracts of mangrove forests, crucial nurseries for thousands of species.
We are kept remarkably ignorant of such issues. As consumers, we are confused, bamboozled and almost powerless – and corporate power has gone to great lengths to persuade us to see ourselves this way. The BBC’s approach to environmental issues is highly partisan, siding with a system that has sought to transfer responsibility for structural forces to individual shoppers. Yet it is only as citizens taking political action that we can promote meaningful change.
The answer to the question “How should we live?” is: “Simply.” But living simply is highly complicated. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the government massacred the Simple Lifers. This is generally unnecessary: today they can safely be marginalised, insulted and dismissed. The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.
One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.
As last month’s Hothouse Earth paper, which warned of the danger of flipping the planet into a new, irreversible climatic state, concluded: “Incremental linear changes … are not enough to stabilise the Earth system. Widespread, rapid and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold.”
Disposable coffee cups made from new materials are not just a non-solution: they are a perpetuation of the problem. Defending the planet means changing the world.
What Does David Attenborough Really Think of Darwin? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/what-does-david-attenborough-really-think-of-darwin
A casual viewer of nature documentaries—or anyone who hasn’t heard of or seen the film Attenborough wrote called, “Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life”—might surmise that the man was hired to narrate the scripts merely because he’s got a great voice.Photograph courtesy Johann Edwin Heupel / FlickrThe name “David Attenborough” has, to me, always been an enchanting but disembodied voice narrating the hidden struggles and splendors of the natural world. In the last few months I’ve seen several of his documentaries (out of the 23 I could count on Netflix) from start to finish—Life, Africa, and Planet Earth. They’re mesmerizing, and some segments can be heart-racing, some distressing, and some morally confusing, as you feel your sympathies tugged in opposite directions (quite often, the offspring of (...)
Blue Planet Two: David Attenborough returns to the oceans - Unearthed
▻https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2017/10/15/blue-planet-two-david-attenborough
Much of the extraordinary footage has been made possible by technology that did not exist when the first series was filmed.
Rebreather equipment allows divers to stay down longer without creating bubbles that disturb the fish. Low-light cameras reveal bioluminescent rays swirling and dancing at night. Tow cameras allow us to surf alongside dolphins; which do so, as far as we can tell, just for the sheer hell of it.
Choice Cuts – Earthsight – Medium
▻https://medium.com/@Earthsight/choice-cuts-e7d736067915
On a vast, hot plateau in Paraguay, in the centre of South America, lies a little-known environmental crisis, and a dirty secret that can be traced to the supermarkets of Europe.
The dry tropical forests of the Chaco are being destroyed faster than any other forests on earth. The trees felled as a result of the advance of industrial agriculture into pristine wilderness are being turned into charcoal to feed demand in Europe.
Described by David Attenborough as “one of the last great wilderness areas in the world”,[1] the Chaco is home to a plethora of precious wildlife and one of the world’s last tribes living in voluntary isolation, the Ayoreo.
This is all now threatened by the advance of deforestation. The Paraguayan Chaco is being cleared by large, private companies to produce charcoal and rear cattle for beef, with the majority of production of both destined for export.
The largest exporter of Paraguayan charcoal is a company called Bricapar. Earthsight investigators found a large Bricapar production facility hidden deep in the heart of the Chaco, and witnessed slow-growing, dense hardwood trees being fed into ovens. Satellite images show ten football pitches of forest per day being cleared in the surrounding area.
Ben oui, le #charbon_de_bois pour les barbec ça entraine la #déforestation #Paraguay
Awesome Animations & Clips from His Films Celebrate David Attenborough at 90
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/awesome-animations-and-clips-from-his-films-celebrate-david-attenbor
We are celebrating the 90th birthday of David Attenborough! Here at BBC Earth Unplugged we’ve teamed up with the legendary Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace & Gromit and Creature Comforts...
Reserves and parks not enough to protect nature – David Attenborough | theguardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/03/david-attenborough-nature-conservation-wildlife
