A Map of the Future of Water

Global changes are altering where and how we get fresh water, sparking the need for worldwide cooperation

The availability of fresh water is rapidly changing all over the world, creating a tenuous future that requires attention from policymakers and the public.

We know this thanks to 14 years’ worth of satellite data collected by a unique NASA Earth-observing mission called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment—which has the gratifying acronym GRACE. Unlike some satellite missions that rely on images, GRACE, which was launched in 2002 and decommissioned at the end of 2017, was more a “scale in the sky.” It measured the very tiny space-time variations in Earth’s gravity field, effectively weighing changes in water mass over large river basins and groundwater aquifers—those porous, subterranean rock and soil layers that store water that must be pumped to the surface.

As complex as that sounds, the results are actually quite simple to understand. The data quantified the rates at which all regions on Earth are gaining or losing water, allowing my colleagues and me to produce the accompanying map. And what the map shows is also simple to understand but deeply troubling: Water security—a phrase that simply means having access to sufficient quantities of safe water for our daily lives—is at a greater risk than most people realize.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

We cannot adapt our way out of climate crisis, warns leading scientist

Katharine Hayhoe says the world is heading for dangers people have not seen in 10,000 years of civilisation

The world cannot adapt its way out of the climate crisis, and counting on adaptation to limit damage is no substitute for urgently cutting greenhouse gases, a leading climate scientist has warned.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in the US and professor at Texas Tech University, said the world was heading for dangers unseen in the 10,000 years of human civilisation, and efforts to make the world more resilient were needed but by themselves could not soften the impact enough.

“People do not understand the magnitude of what is going on,” she said. “This will be greater than anything we have ever seen in the past. This will be unprecedented. Every living thing will be affected.”

LINK TO ENTIRE ARTICLE

ZENARCHY ON IMMEDIATISM PODCAST

ORIGINAL POST: https://anarchistnews.org/content/zenarchy-immediatism-podcast

After a break in recording, Immediatism has finished a reading of the book Zenarchy, by Kerry Thornley. With frequent references to taoism, and a delightful sense of humor and lightness, this is a late 20th century classic, read by listener request.

Episode 810 concludes with the Eight Principles of the No Politics of Zenarchy:
First Principle: prisons breed crime
Second Principle: ignorance is slavery
Third Principle: it ain’t the landlord; it’s the rent
Fourth Principle: money is only a symbol
Fifth Principle: absentee control of the workplace is the root of all oppression
Sixth Principle: resist all forms of coercive authority
Seventh Principle: liberation is for everybody
Eighth Principle: transistorized untouchables exist

Note: Immediatism podcast is on the lookout for a used/rebuilt mac mini to replace its 12-year-old one.
Cory@Immediatism.com

Race to save undersea Stone Age cave art masterpieces

To reach the only place in the world where cave paintings of prehistoric marine life have been found, archaeologists have to dive to the bottom of the Mediterranean off southern France.

Then they have to negotiate a 137-meter (yard) natural tunnel into the rock, passing through the mouth of the cave until they emerge into a huge cavern, much of it now submerged.

Three men died trying to discover this “underwater Lascaux” as rumors spread of a cave to match the one in southwestern France that completely changed the way we see our Stone Age ancestors.

Lascaux—which Picasso visited in 1940—proved the urge to make art is as old as humanity itself.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

The Insanity Artist

The story of Tehching Hsieh, a performance artist who went to extreme places mentally for the sake of his art.

The banks collapsed in 2008 – and our food system is about to do the same

Massive food producers hold too much power – and the regulators scarcely understand what is happening. Sound familiar?

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of systemic instability.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

Coyotes and Town Dogs

The American Conservation Classic

Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement

Revised and Updated in a 25th Anniversary Edition

Praise for Coyotes and Town Dogs

Susan Zakin’s writing is brilliant and irreverent, tough and funny, opinionated and sometimes outrageous But this is also a serious work, the most thorough and thoughtful survey of the American environmental movement I have seen.

Brad Knickerbocker, The Christian Science Monitor

Catches the rowdy, passionate utopianism of the first non-elite generation of environmentalists. They changed the game, and woke a lot of people up.

Gary Snyder, Pultizer-Prize winning poet, Turtle Island, Practice of the Wild

A primer for how to face our Earth’s predicament with wit and courage…Funny, smart, irreverent, opinionated and always mind-expanding.

Bill McKibben, author, The End of Nature, founder 350.org

Riding the rails with YouTube’s hobo vloggers

Critics say their content is dangerous and irresponsible, but these influencers can’t get enough of the train-hopping life.

Dancer vividly remembers the first time he hopped a freight train.

It was a warm October day in 2020, and he’d stationed himself north of Longmont, Colorado, near the railway yard, where the train often rolls through town. He’d been standing next to a tree for hours, debating whether he was really going to go through with this dangerous act — and trying to ease the butterflies in his stomach.

He’d learned about train-hopping in 2017, after discovering the videos of James “Jim” Stobie, a prolific vlogger known online as Stobe the Hobo. Stobie died later that same year, after getting into an accident while hopping trains in Maryland. He was 33. Nevertheless, Dancer was inspired by the key message of Stobie’s videos: that viewers should see the often-unexplored areas of the U.S.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

When Felonies Become Form: The Secret History of Artists Who Use Lawbreaking as Their Medium

Eva and Franco Mattes’s “Stolen Pieces” series, objects taken from works by (clockwise from top left): Alberto Burri, Vasily Kandinsky, Jeff Koons, Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, and César.
COURTESY THE ARTISTS

Artists have long gotten away with murder, sometimes literally. After Benvenuto Cellini killed his rival, the goldsmith Pompeo de Capitaneis, in 1534, Pope Paul III—a Cellini fan—reportedly pardoned the Florentine artist, declaring that men like him “ought not to be bound by law.” In 1660 the Dutch painter Jacob van Loo stabbed a wine merchant to death during a brawl in Amsterdam, and then fled to Paris. But, as the art historians Rudolf and Margot Wittkower have noted in their vigorously researched 1963 treatise on the behavior of artists, Born Under Saturn, van Loo had no problem being elected to the Royal Academy there just two years later. His reputation as an artist was what mattered.

Artists have not only indulged in criminal behavior and then been forgiven for it, by philosophers and historians, princes and popes, they have also sometimes openly advertised it. “I do not understand laws,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote in 1873, summing up the attitude of the renegade artist. “I have no moral sense. I am a brute.”

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

From Hero to Trickster – Humanity’s Initiation

The reign of the Hero has come to an end. As humanity faces increasing crisis and collapse, we come to a threshold where the archetype of the Hero can no longer be our saviour. We have entered a liminal time – a space between stories – and so we must bend and instead look to, and learn from, the boundary-crossing, shape-shifting Trickster.

Join Ben Murphy and John Wolfstone as they explore the significance of this cultural transition and how it applies to each of our lives.

Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam

A Map of the Future of Water

Global changes are altering where and how we get fresh water, sparking the need for worldwide cooperation

Like this:

We cannot adapt our way out of climate crisis, warns leading scientist

Katharine Hayhoe says the world is heading for dangers people have not seen in 10,000 years of civilisation

LINK TO ENTIRE ARTICLE

Like this:

ZENARCHY ON IMMEDIATISM PODCAST

Like this:

Race to save undersea Stone Age cave art masterpieces

Like this:

The Insanity Artist

Like this:

The banks collapsed in 2008 – and our food system is about to do the same

Massive food producers hold too much power – and the regulators scarcely understand what is happening. Sound familiar?

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

Like this:

Coyotes and Town Dogs

Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement

Like this:

Riding the rails with YouTube’s hobo vloggers

Critics say their content is dangerous and irresponsible, but these influencers can’t get enough of the train-hopping life.

Dancer vividly remembers the first time he hopped a freight train.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

Like this:

When Felonies Become Form: The Secret History of Artists Who Use Lawbreaking as Their Medium

Like this:

From Hero to Trickster – Humanity’s Initiation

Like this:

Global changes are altering where and how we get fresh water, sparking the need for worldwide cooperation

Share this:

Like this:

Katharine Hayhoe says the world is heading for dangers people have not seen in 10,000 years of civilisation

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Massive food producers hold too much power – and the regulators scarcely understand what is happening. Sound familiar?

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Critics say their content is dangerous and irresponsible, but these influencers can’t get enough of the train-hopping life.

Dancer vividly remembers the first time he hopped a freight train.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: