#ecoside

“As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeons with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possible can.”

“Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend.”

― Edward Osborne Wilson -

PANDEMIC -OP-ED - 11-10-2,021. PLANET: TERRA.

Photo: Man protesting Chile’s ‘Clothing Dump’ and ‘International Textile Pollution’ by buying environmentally friendly plants and going nude while tending them. 

“At least 39,000 tons of discarded fast fashion is being left in rubbish dumps in Chile’s Atacama, the driest desert in the world.

Every year, around 59,000 tons of secondhand and unsold clothing, often from China or Bangladesh, reaches Chile after passing through Europe, Asia or the United States, according to a report by AFP.

The clothes are sent to the Iquique port in the Alto Hospicio free zone in northern Chile from where some of the clothes are resold around Latin America, but the majority ends up in the desert because no one pays the necessary tariffs to take it away.”

“Globally, an estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste is created each year and the equivalent to a rubbish truck full of clothes ends up on landfill sites every second.

According to charity Keep Britain Tidy, “a staggering 10,000 items of clothing being sent to landfill every five minutes, equivalent to £140 million in value every year.”

A 2019 UN report found that global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, and the industry is “responsible for 20 percent of total water waste on a global level.”

Wasted clothes left in landfill and other dumps, such as in the Atacama, can take hundreds of years to biodegrade, polluting the environment and some water supplies as they do.”

Photo: Atacama Desert-Chile.

“I watched life and wanted to be a part of it but found it painfully difficult.”

REALITY OR FANTASY?

 Friday Morning OP-ED-8/28/2020

“I’m not a religious person, or someone who sees messages written in clouds, but if I were, I might believe that Mother Nature is trying to tell President Donald Trump something right now. California is burning, a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 150 mph just blasted into the Louisiana coast, and nearly 180,000 are reported dead from a viral outbreak that is just a harbinger of what one scientist calls “a new pandemic era” driven in part by our changing climate and wanton destruction of ecosystems. But on the eve of Trump’s big speech to accept the Republican nomination, if Mother Nature had a voice, I imagine she would say something like this: Pay attention to me, asshole, or you — and every generation of humans to come — will regret it.

But that’s not what Mother Nature is saying. Mother Nature (a corny but, somehow, still useful phrase that goes back to the Greeks) doesn’t say things directly. She doesn’t give a shit about Trump, or his re-election, or about you or me, or the coastline of Louisiana, or the majestic coast redwoods in California. She operates with the cold, careless laws of physics and chemistry. In the vast space of time, our magnificent Earth is a random collection of molecules, a mote of dust flying in the 150 mph winds of Hurricane Laura.....”

Read the article from Rolling Stone here: ‘Climate Apocalypse Now’

“THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILIZATION” 1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it. 2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’. 3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths. 4. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality. 5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world. 6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels. 7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails. 8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.”

"The Apurinã were gathered to discuss the emergency. In recent years, outlaws with chainsaws, known as land-grabbers, or grileiros, “locusts,” have been cutting deeper into Brazil’s Indigenous territories and other protected forests throughout the Amazon. Emboldened by the October election of Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s president, they are pushing more brazenly into places like Apurinã land in the roadless depths of Amazonas, the country’s biggest state and home to the world’s largest standing tracts of unbroken rainforest. “With Bolsonaro, the invasions are worse and will continue to get worse,” said Francisco Umanari, a 42-year-old Apurinã chief. “His project for the Amazon is agribusiness. Unless he is stopped, he’ll run over our rights and allow a giant invasion of the forest. The land grabs are not new, but it’s become a question of life and death.”

Over the next two days, a hundred Apurinã men, women, and children met in a riverside thatched-roof meeting hall to confront their fears and make plans. They did so against the ticking of the Amazon’s monsoonal clock. In July and August, the rains will stop and the rivers will fall, adding hours and days of boat travel between villages and the nearest frontier towns. The coming of dry season also heralds the next wave of burnings. Last year, after government satellites detected smoke plumes, a group of Apurinã men arrived to find 1,000 hectares of their ancestral forest gone. “We were shocked at the size of it,” said Marcelino Da Silva, one of the men. To create pasture, the land-grabbers hacked miles of path through the forest with machetes and used motorcycles to transport long-blade chainsaws and drums of kerosene. The land being too remote for logging, they used even the most valuable trees for kindling, seeding the smoldering ashes with orchard grass dropped from helicopters."

-The Intercept-

Good Morning/Afternoon Tumblrs!

“And I think that would be a shame, don't you?”

“When it comes to looking after all the species that are already endangered, there's such a lot to do that sometimes it might all seem to be too much, especially when there are so many other important things to worry about. But if we stop trying, the chances are that pretty soon we'll end up with a world where there are no tigers or elephants, or sawfishes or whooping cranes, or albatrosses or ground iguanas. And I think that would be a shame, don't you?” ― Martin Jenkins, Can We Save the Tiger?