Tag: environment

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.

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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

Katharine Hayhoe
Katharine Hayhoe warns that if we continue emitting greenhouse gases no adaptation will be possible. Photograph: Courtesy of Dr Katharine Hayhoe

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.”

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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?

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

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.

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Coyotes and Town Dogs

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.Riding the rails with YouTube’s hobo vloggers

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.

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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.

Ted Kaczynski – Industrial Society and Its Future (Unabomber Manifesto) a Collection

Ted Kaczynski – Industrial Society and Its Future (Unabomber Manifesto) Audiobook

THE GRAPHIC NOVEL: https://libgen.rocks/ads.php?md5=e96e321397dc6714a712f0d89f152cb8

Ted Kaczynski's Industrial society and its future: The graphic novelValentín Ramón Menendez, Theodore John Kaczinsky - Ted Kaczynski's Industrial society and its future_ The graphic novel (2021) - libgen.li

Podcast

Breaking Down: Collapse
Episode 86 – Anti-Technology and the Unabomber with David Skrbina

This week we interview David Skrbina, an author and professor who writes about his anti-technology philosphy. David has written a book with Ted Kazynski (the Unabomber) who holds a similar philosophy.

In the interview, we discuss David’s philosophy, his vision for the future, as well as his book with Ted Kazynski.

You can find his books here: Confronting Technology, Metaphysics of Technology, Technological Slavery.

If you’d like to join David’s “Anti-Tech Collective”, you can do so here.

David Skrbina (sker-BEE-na), PhD, was a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan, Dearborn from 2003 to 2018. He taught a graduate course in Technology and Sustainability at the University of Helsinki in fall, 2020. His areas of interest include philosophy of mind, eco-philosophy, philosophy of technology, and environmental ethics.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

https://wwnorton.com/books/survival-of-the-richest

Great Twitter thread by the author: https://twitter.com/rushkoff/status/1522572328714047488?s=20&t=k2iPC0bpxBQZ1CFZwTydGA

The tech elite have a plan to survive the apocalypse: they want to leave us all behind.

Five mysterious billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive The Event: the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff came to understand that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley–style certainty that they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making—as long as they have enough money and the right technology. In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, and the Metaverse. This mind-blowing work of social analysis shows us how to transcend the landscape The Mindset created—a world alive with algorithms and intelligences actively rewarding our most selfish tendencies—and rediscover community, mutual aid, and human interdependency. Instead of changing the people, he argues, we can change the program.

‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves

April temperatures at unprecedented levels have led to critical water and electricity shortages

‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves
A man walks across a dried bed of the Yamuna River in New Delhi, India. Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP

For the past few weeks, Nazeer Ahmed has been living in one of the hottest places on Earth. As a brutal heatwave has swept across India and Pakistan, his home in Turbat, in Pakistan’s Balochistan region, has been suffering through weeks of temperatures that have repeatedly hit almost 50C (122F), unprecedented for this time of year. Locals have been driven into their homes, unable to work except during the cooler night hours, and are facing critical shortages of water and power.

Ahmed fears that things are only about to get worse. It was here, in 2021, that the world’s highest temperature for May was recorded, a staggering 54C. This year, he said, feels even hotter. “Last week was insanely hot in Turbat. It did not feel like April,” he said.

As the heatwave has exacerbated massive energy shortages across India and Pakistan, Turbat, a city of about 200,000 residents, now barely receives any electricity, with up to nine hours of load shedding every day, meaning that air conditioners and refrigerators cannot function. “We are living in hell,” said Ahmed.

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FBI Warns of Targeted Cyberattacks on Food Plants Amid Heightened Coverage of Fires

The J. Edgar Hoover Building of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seen on April 03, 2019 in Washington, DC. – The FBI is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States, and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is also a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and reports to both the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. (Photo by Eric BARADAT / AFP) (Photo by ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images)

The FBI’s Cyber Division issued a warning about potential cyberattacks on agricultural cooperatives and food plants amid increasing media coverage of recent fires and explosions at food processing plants across the United States.

“Ransomware actors may be more likely to attack agricultural cooperatives during critical planting and harvest seasons, disrupting operations, causing financial loss, and negatively impacting the food supply chain,” the FBI’s recent notice said (pdf), adding that ransomware attacks in 2021 and early 2022 could disrupt the planting season by affecting “the supply of seeds and fertilizer.”

“A significant disruption of grain production could impact the entire food chain, since grain is not only consumed by humans but also used for animal feed,” the bureau also warned, adding that “a significant disruption of grain and corn production could impact commodities trading and stocks.”

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