We Need To Clean up Our Oil Act and Introduce Transportation Alternatives – Bicycle-Pedestrian Infrastructure, Trains, Trams, Battery Operated Public Buses

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/health-sapping.htmlSatellite Maps created by NASA documenting the unseen air pollution killer.

I was reading this article in the New York Times about the massive oil that has leaked in the Gulf of Mexico after hurricane Ida, and the regularity of leaks springing from both active and inactive/abandoned oil pipelines and platforms there.

After Hurricane Ida, Oil Infrastructure Springs Dozens of Leaks

By Blacki Migliozzi and Hiroko Tabuchi Sept. 26, 2021

“There are some important caveats. NOAA’s satellite tracking effort started years after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which triggered a series of spills that ultimately released about 10 million gallons into the Gulf, the same amount of oil as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off of Alaska. It also doesn’t cover BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010, which spewed more than 120 million gallons of oil, the biggest offshore oil spill in United States history. (At the time, NOAA did engage in an experimental effort to use satellite imagery to track the oil’s spread.)”

By Blacki Migliozzi and Hiroko Tabuchi Sept. 26, 2021

“The spills caused by Hurricane Ida have brought more damage to a shoreline made fragile from decades of oil and gas drilling. One of the slicks was very near the East Timbalier Island National Wildlife Refuge, an ecologically-rich part of a barrier island chain. “We won’t know the true ecological impact for a while,” said Scott Eustis, community science director at the New Orleans-based nonprofit, Healthy Gulf, who has long studied the effect of oil and gas drilling on Louisiana’s wetlands. Some scientists have said the island is too far gone to save.”

“On Aug. 30, even as the thick slicks spread their way across the water, the Biden administration moved to lease more than 80 million acres in the Gulf for new oil and gas production. “

Lawsuit Filed After Biden Opens 80 Million Acres of Gulf of Mexico for Oil

https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/lawsuit-filed-after-biden-opens-79-million-acres-of-gulf-of-mexico-for-oil-2021-08-31/

Just days ago, ‘Major’ Oil Spill Off California Coast Threatens Wetlands and Wildlife was written for the New York Times by Neil Vigdor, Melina Delkic.

“Mayor Kim Carr of Huntington Beach, CA said “the responsible parties” to blame for the spill should “do everything possible to rectify this environmental catastrophe.” She added that officials were looking at measures “to make sure that they are held accountable for this.”

In the meantime, we receive new like this.

And the United States of America remains car-centered. Why do we continue to ignore this?

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041393172/u-s-says-ivory-billed-woodpecker-and-more-than-20-other-species-have-gone-extinc

Perhaps it’s Ecological Amnesia: Life Without Wild Things

“E.O Wilson on the protection of Half-Earth for biodiversity: “There are ways to stop [mass species extinction] and I think we’re going to have to start talking about big changes in how much of the Earth’s surface we put aside for nature just to keep it from going extinct in a very short period of time. And I’m in a group of scientists working very hard on that part right now.”

STORY: Mass Species Extinction and Wilding the Wilderness

Perhaps it’s because the majority of humanity are so distanced from caring about all the other lives with whom we share our planet, because of our anthropocentrism.

Eileen Crist: Confronting Anthropocentrism

The answer? Change not just our diets and lifestyles, but specifically our Transportation.

“Mayor Anne Hidalgo eventually wants to make Paris a mostly car-free city, part of a much wider push by leaders around the globe to rethink the car’s place in the urban landscape. Her next big initiatives, in addition to Ville Du Quart D’Heure (city of fifteen minutes), include following up on her plan to ban diesel cars by 2024 and fuel cars by 2030 within city limits, and a coalition of local cycling associations plans to release a proposal to extend the city’s bike network into the suburbs.

It’s all part of her wider climate policy, which includes providing subsidized public transit for children, expanding public transit, and greening the city with new parks and urban forests.

But Hidalgo’s key message—that seriously addressing climate change can also improve your quality of life by cutting air pollution and getting more people out of cars—is one more and more leaders should echo. McLeod says that conversation linking climate change and transportation, especially given the partisan divide on environmental policies in the U.S., is making it harder to make that kind of infrastructure push underway in Paris.”

“Parisians have heeded the call: A million people in a metropolis of 10 million are now pedaling daily. And Paris now ranks among the world’s top 10 cycling cities.”

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my mountain bicycle

Amtrak bound

New, Improved, Updated – Growth At Any Cost – Driving Global Warming, Ecocide and Addiction | Real Time with Bill Maher

I was astounded to listen to this last night for the first time.

New Rule: Growth At Any Cost | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO). 

No network news will EVER address this; NEVER address the business as usual, Profit for each Quarter status quo.

What if we just stopped buying and buying into it?

New and improved, just $19.99, $99.99, $99,099…

Bill Maher so boldly and eloquently unveils what we the consumer, blindly succumb to, the marketing tactics of the good ole United States of Apathy.

Where to begin to instate new habits and ways of seeing the world? Start with our unconscious addiction to buying. Consumerism bleeding the natural world.  

Great video depicting the tragedy of consumerism, Happiness by Steve Cutts

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDkHappiness by Steve Cutts

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the back yard of the family home where I was raised in Pennsylvania, USA

Sufi master – Fire Season | Myth of Progress and Endless Economic growth fostering Ecocide

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee – Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order – writes for Parabola Magazine Fire Season – A Sufi master looks at—and beyond—the approaching flames

“Will the fires and floods finally awaken us, turn our attention back to the living Earth? Or have we lost that connection, that place of belonging? How long before we are forced to wake from this nightmare of alienation? I used to imagine how Spring would come after the hard Winter of materialism, after all those years when we put profit before people, before the more-than-human world.

The fires remind us that our present story is broken, its myth of progress and endless economic growth fostering ecocide.

Nature untouched, thrives.

Meanwhile, in East Africa, the Somali pastoralists have already moved on, after watching their animals die in the years of drought. They’ve left the land they’d walked for centuries, moving into camps. They know that climate change brings hunger and migration, as they suffer the effects of our use of fossil fuels. They did not put carbon into the atmosphere. They are too poor to pollute. But they are among the first to suffer.

I am sure we will find a victim to blame, anything to escape the deep knowing that our way of life is over, that we cannot continue with this story of exploitation and consumerism, this plague that is burning the land.

Years ago I had a series of visions of the future, of a civilization waiting to be born. I was shown how we would find new ways of healing, bringing together the wisdom of the shaman with the techniques of modern medicine. I saw how we would be given a technology as simple as photosynthesis that could provide us all with free and unpolluting energy from the sun. I saw earth magic coming alive, plants speaking to us again after centuries of silence.

The pandemic has taught us about uncertainty, and the need to listen even more closely to the Earth, to sense her present imbalance.

I used to think that I would live to see the future of my visions. Now I only hope that my grandchildren’s grandchildren will walk in a kinder world, alive to a multidimensional kinship, knowing that everything they can see, hear, and touch is sacred.”

Text excerpted from his article. https://parabola.org/2021/08/01/fire-season/

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World Elephant Day | Elephant Sanctuaries

I previously contacted a sanctuary inquiring about working or volunteering there and learned that they only hire local people. They want people to be available for years for the benefit of the animals. When they are locals, they can receive a long term commitment by people, with whom the elephants can establish a relationship with continuity over time.

I’ll simply try to volunteer sometime.

Kenya’s indigenously run elephant sanctuary.

Soil not Oil in our Climate Crisis | Al Jazeera – Big Oil’s Campaign Against Climate | Monbiot on Brexit – Capitalism’s Civil War | Kiss the Ground | Happy Earth Day April 22

Vandana Shiva wrote the book “Soil Not Oil – Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis”. In it she argues that the solution to the global crisis lies in sustainable, biologically diverse farms. She mentions in her speech terra viva manifesto Italiano.

Vandana Shiva is so incredibly eloquent and thorough in describing the world we live in as Keynote Speaker in the Soil Not Oil International Conference.

Russell Brand’s current interview with Vandana Shiva is inspiring. 

Oil | Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj | Netflix

I just recently viewed on Al Jazeera the documentary “The Campaign Against the Climate: Debunking climate change denial.” It exposes oil industry leaders and their multi-million-dollar, 30-year denial campaigns that have undermined science and cast doubt on the dangers of climate change.

The documentary by Josh Tickel Kiss the Ground reasserts this.

Within this two part interview which George Monbiot on Brexit: Capitalism’s Civil War

presents that we need to systematically and structurally change our relationship within our cultures, between one another and with the other creatures with whom we share the planet. “We need to make the priority to sustain life on earth”.

Giornata Mondiale della Terra 2021

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“12 Steps to Climate Sobriety” by Erik Molvar

12 Steps to Climate Sobriety by Erik Molvar 12/17/15 

“The nations of the world have unanimously agreed, 195 to zero, that climate change is a major problem, that human activities are a major cause and that it’s high time to do something about it. Those debates are now over globally, although some American politicians have yet to notice.

This signals the arrival of a new era, an era in which the catastrophic consequences of our global fossil fuel addiction have become so obvious that they can no longer be ignored. Recognizing that the world has a problem — and that human activities caused it — is the first step on the long and uncertain path to finding solutions. The Paris summit should put to rest the last of the climate deniers in our own nation.

A new Yale University study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science demonstrates that for past two decades, corporate funding has served as the underpinning of a unified network of “contrarian” lobbying firms, politicians and think tanks dedicated to polarizing the issue of climate change and creating the appearance of scientific doubt that human activities are the source of global climate problems. In short, we’ve been taken for a ride. Now that the tie between corporate funding and specific language and thematic content of climate deniers has been demonstrated scientifically with robust data, political leaders should dispense with the charades and start seeking solutions instead.

Solving the world’s climate crisis probably won’t involve digging up Canadian boreal forests to extract tar sands, and then spending more fossil fuels refining them into a usable product to burn. They probably don’t involve strip mining the American West in a quest for low-grade kerogen trapped in “oil shale,” a primitive oil precursor, or digging up the even more primitive deposits of coal. Drilling and fracking the Sagebrush Sea for natural gas and oil will only set progress back. Deforestation, either in remaining old-growth pockets in the Pacific Northwest that still support spotted owls, or in the tropical rainforests so amazing in their biodiversity, will need to be reversed, not accelerated.Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has developed a famously successful 12-step pathway to help people beat their addictions to alcohol. Modern society’s addiction to fossil fuels is disastrous on a global scale, disrupting the family of nations and visiting calamity on individuals and communities, in a macrocosm of the problems caused by alcoholism. So presented below is a 12-step pathway to climate sobriety, adapted from the blueprint invented by AA (while honoring our Constitution, which requires separation of church and state) to put us all on a path to a more fruitful and sustainable human future:

1. Recognize that burning fossil fuels has altered our global climate by radically increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the air, that deforestation is crippling the planet’s natural ability to absorb this extra carbon and that animal agriculture (especially ruminants like cattle that belch climactically potent methane) plays a significant role in accelerating the aboveground carbon cycle.

2. Recognize that there is a higher authority that can help solve these problems and help restore us to sanity, and it’s called “science.”

3. Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the planet, without which there is no survival for our interdependent web of life, humans included.

4. Make a searching inventory of our own energy uses to increase our own efficiency and reduce our energy footprint as individuals, corporations, governments and nations.

5. Admit to the world that throughout our development as a nation, these United States have, more than any other nation, contributed to the changing global climate through our conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels and have profited from this problematic behavior through the enrichment of a privileged few exploiting mineral resources, both here in the United States and around the world.

6. Make it a priority at all levels of government to remove our own defects of energy use, through ending fossil fuel subsidies of all kinds, keeping publicly owned fossil fuels in the ground, incentivizing renewable energy sources, developing a smarter electrical grid to handle complexities in powering our nation from renewable sources, and empowering individual citizens to become renewable energy producers at the household scale.

7. Humbly ask scientific researchers and engineers, with the support of ample research and development funding, to invent more energy-efficient instruments for our daily lives, and to provide new solutions to global transportation, electrical generation and agricultural practices that eliminate fossil fuel consumption.

8. Make a list of all human communities and natural ecosystems harmed by fossil fuel extraction, combustion and resulting climate disruptions, to gain a complete understanding of the harm we have caused.

9. Make direct amends to such communities and ecosystems through reparations by the fossil fuel industry that fund active restoration of damaged ecosystems, build resilience into communities battered by climate disruption and especially provide subsidies for developing nations to develop their energy technologies along clean, renewable lines.

10. Continue to take an inventory of energy consumption and production here in the United States in an energy audit every five years, and take corrective actions as needed to ensure that we are meeting or exceeding targets to keep the rise in global temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

11. Seek through continued scientific research to improve our conscious contact with the planet that supports us, developing methods to move from a culture of exploitation to a culture of stewardship that respects the health of the planet and all living beings, and thereby safeguards the future well-being of humanity for all time.

12. Having achieved our climate awakening and developed sustainable, renewable ways to power our society while protecting our environment as a result of these steps, carry this message and these technologies and innovations to other nations throughout the world so that they might also thrive, and practice these principles in all our affairs.

The fossil fuel industry’s public relations teams would like us all to believe that we are powerless to control our energy habits. Now is our big opportunity to prove that we are not slaves. Step one is to banish the doubts (and doubters) of human-caused climate change to the dustbin of history. The Paris accord has done just that.

Molvar is the Sagebrush Sea Campaign Director for WildEarth Guardians, a nonprofit environmental group working to protect wildlife, wild places, wild rivers and the health of the American West.”

Global Heating Feedback Loops – Dalai Lama – Greta Thunberg | Mass Extinction | Last Rhino

The Earth is Warming the Earth. Series of five short films.

Now that our swamp of denial is going to be drained and replenished in the White House with a semblance of normality that instead promotes honesty and directed effort, we can also establish an epic new road as citizens to participate in the health of the globe and its inhabitants. The opposite of nationalism, of waving a flag that is only showing devotion to a particular place, we can extend our love and care to the world. Not just our little family, our 30 mile radius of our town or county, but actually showing interest in the health of the planet, every creature that happens to be share our planet, before they are all wiped out. Godliness is not worshiping in a massive building on Sundays, it is extending empathy and care and love to the fate of our entire home. We have had an economy driven by this promise of security through ‘jobs’ and ‘finance’, but this means NOTHING, if the planet and all of the species around us in the ‘Garden of Eden’ are dead or diseased.

Wake up World. Listen to the Dalai Lama,

https://carolkeiter.wordpress.com/2017/08/25/dalai-lama-on-war-war-is-criminal-abominable-despicable-legalized-terrorism-through-brainwashing

Listen to the pure intuitive instinct of a young unpolluted, unjaded girl who connected the dots of information and saw the complete and brutal denial that the citizens of the world have been swept into, this lopsided prioritization of ‘work and earning money’, that actually contributes to the destruction of the earth and spoiling of all habitats.

The Last Two Northern White Rhinos On Earth written By Sam Anderson.

Published Jan. 6, 2021/Updated Jan. 14, 2021. As a journalist, he journeyed to go spend time with the 2 last remaining White Rhino’s, where he came to love them. And in the process of spending time with them and contemplating their fate, he realized that the problem that the human species has contributed to their demise – the cornerstone problem of mass extinction – besides habitat loss, pollution of air, water, soil, the heating globe, wars, poaching (rhino horns worth more than gold)…is that ‘Love among humans seems to have a range of thirty (30) yards. People love and cherish their own families, what they come into contact with personally, yet don’t seem to have the imagination or abstract thinking to extend ‘love’ and empathy to all creatures, and therefore, humanity will never act with the collective urgency that is required to stop the massive climate disruption and mass extinction. In the USA, we don’t even seem to be able to grasp when we are robbed by the government and laws are passed to give charity to billionaires and corporations, but deny it to the people. As long as we are distracted by busily working to pay exorbitant rents all across the nation and drooling into complacency watching a TV show. nobody seems to be paying attention. 

Top scientists warn of ‘ghastly future of mass extinction‘ and climate disruption. Sobering new report says world is failing to grasp the extent of threats posed by biodiversity loss and the climate crisis.

https://digesthis.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/on-positive-transformation-to-health-and-sustainability-through-food-sovereignty-joe-brewer-working-for-billionaires-vandana-shiva-soil-not-oil-dahlia-wasfi-md-on-monsantos-seed-te/

I sit in a new apartment, having driven across the country after searching where I may be able to afford to live. The tap water smells and is toxic, it is cockroach infested and a housemate smokes inside, the area is a ‘food desert’, Walmart has the monopoly on grocery stores. However, I can not presently afford to live anywhere else. I cringe, as a person who is extremely focused on cleanliness and fresh air, yet I need to persist and do all that I can with my own efforts to endure. Why, because I can not as an artist, writer and intellect who cares deeply about the fate of all of the creatures of the world and have cast blame at the laziness and incognizance of humans to how their actions affect everything, everywhere, do anything but continue to do what I believe is right and just.

A Story about the Intelligence of Other Sentient Beings | BirdBrains

My sister told me this story today over the phone, when I mentioned that I come to this one spot to watch and count the birds that hang out always on the same wire at the same location, above this bridge. Oh, I get it, maybe people have thrown food over it at one time, or whatever, they like the sound of things walking or rolling over the wood.

She said that a friend of hers, years ago, who drove a truck as a AAA ‘rescue’ vehicle, was somewhere in the West, maybe Colorado. He told my sister that this one day, he was coming to an intersection that lasted, extraordinarily long. Each time the light changed and the cars were now given the green light, it would promptly change back to yellow and red.

As he literally inched his way closer to the intersection, he finally saw what was going on. A solitary Starling bird, with extraordinary intelligence, was snacking on a dead body in the center of the road. Each time the light was about to change, the bird flew the force of his body to spring off and press the button for pedestrians to Change the Traffic Light to allow pedestrian traffic. The Starling kept doing this repeatedly, so that he/she could get as many morsels of the meal in the middle of the road, without traffic impeding its dining progress.

I don’t know where the term bird brain came from, but this bird, and many birds, are way smarter than we give them credit for. I know that there are people sensitive, intuitive and aware enough to ‘communicate’ with all sorts of animals and birds.

Gosh, I hope for people to feel and ‘re cognize’ that the world in which we live, is not only about humans  and their endeavors and stuff, but one which is part of rich, interdependent fabric of life on this planet. All life forms with whom we share our planet deserve our admiration, awe, respect and devotion. Our actions should always be influenced with our perception of how it will affect other sentient beings. We are guardians of the habitat and survival, of all the other species on this planet. What a Wonderful World of life. 

The richness of our lives, depends not on economics and finance, but ecology and the wealth of biodiversity. 

Be an Eco Warrior,

an Environmental Warrior

Environmental Warriors: and Places That Help Save the Planet All Year

a climate warrior 

to protect the life forms and habitats of those with whom we share our planet. 

Just Do It! Share the Love.

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Good For All Challenge | Roots & Shoots – Jane Goodall

https://www.rootsandshoots.org/challenges/good-for-all-challenge/

I’m in. Hope you join in also.!

Thank you Jane Goodall for a lifetime of risk and effort to help the living creatures of the world and to save their habitats. Thank you for continually reaching out to people of the world to educate and encourage other humans to recognize the beauty and intelligence of other creatures; to respect them and see that our habits and actions can indeed make their world a better place. 

Earth Day 50th | We Love The Earth | Confronting Anthropocentrism | Look for the Good

Here is to looking forward! Change our hearts from our anthropomorphic view of only seeing the earth and all of its different creatures as resources and objects to use, to loving all earthlings. and recognizing our interdependency.

We Love The Earth

We Love The Earth animated video By Lil Dicky – Earth

The

50th Anniversary of Earth Day

was officially April 22, 2020. I watched the ongoing broadcasts and listened to many very articulate youth activists who fully impressed me. There were numerous featured scientists, artists and musicians and indigenous people bringing forth informative and inspiring messages as well. Thank you all so much for sharing and being part of the voice of the new evolving story.

What prompted me to write this blog in the first place, was synchronistically coming upon this powerful 20 minute video presentation by Eileen Crist, in her ‘Confronting Anthropocentrism’. Powerful information as a mirror for humanity to look into the mirror, and move forward.

Confronting Anthropocentrism presentation by Eileen Crist

Even Pope Francis speaks to power. The pontiff said that the (Wuhan virus) Coronavirus outbreak offers an opportunity to slow down the rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.

“We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?” the Pope said.

Pope Francis says Wuhan Virus Nature’s Response to Climate Crisis

Imagining a Post-Coronavirus World: Ending Ravenous Capitalism and Our Consumer-Driven Promiscuity

Imagining a Post-Coronavirus World: Ending Ravenous Capitalism and Our Consumer-Driven Promiscuity, Andy Worthington

The Solutions to the Climate Crisis No One is Talking About with Robert Reich

Storyteller and film maker Julio Vincent Gambuto wrote an excellent article talking about moving forward. “Prepare for the Ultimate Gas Lighting”

“What happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. Not the deaths, not the virus, but The Great Pause”

And with this, I only will add two wonderful music videos by artists who contributed their work for Earth Day.

This astoundingly positive message by Jason Mraz – Look For The Good