Diminished by climate change and overuse, the river can no longer provide the water states try to take from it.
LINK: https://www.propublica.org/article/colorado-river-water-uncompahgre-california-arizona
Tag: green energy
What the “other side” thinks
LINK: https://www.smalltowndicks.com/episode/deep-cover/
Usually, I’m not particularly eager to push people’s outrage buttons. However, I think this may include a teaching moment.
This is a “true crime” podcast that uses real, small-town cops telling their stories about small-town crime and is hosted by Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson.
Why I include this today is because it really struck me as a prime example of what law enforcement and mainstream folks think of radical environmentalists. So, take your blood pressure medication and listen and learn.
Breaking Down: Collapse
Episode 114 – Interview with Shaun Chamberlin
Shaun Chamberlin is an author and activist who has been exploring collapse and possible responses for over twenty years. He is the editor of ‘Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy’ and his late mentor David Fleming’s ‘Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It’, as well as executive producer of 2020 film ‘The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation?’
He puts the theory into practice as one of the custodians of Ireland’s legendary free pub ‘The Happy Pig’ and was involved with the Transition Towns movement since its inception, co-founding Transition Town Kingston and authoring the movement’s second book, ‘The Transition Timeline’, back in 2009. He was also one of the first Extinction Rebellion arrestees, in 2018, and now leads Sterling College’s online program ‘Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time’.
Shaun’s website: http://darkoptimism.org
‘Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Times’ courses/community: http://ce.sterlingcollege.edu/surviving-the-future…
David Fleming’s books: http://flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/books/
Free access to David Fleming’s Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It: http://leanlogic.online
Destination Morocco Podcast
Listen to our podcast before your trip to Morocco!
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
The Fourth Revolution
The Light Age is the Dark Age, part two
By now, you might have heard about the rising threat of ‘eco-fascism’. If you haven’t you soon will, because the number of people warning about this alarming new danger to civilisation seems to be growing exponentially. In publications right and left and neither you’ll be able to read long expositions of the origins and intentions of this frightening movement, which seems to be taking root all over the world.
Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems like they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the ‘rising tide of authoritarianism’ all over the world, as evidenced by ‘populism’, Brexit, Georgia Melloni, Viktor Orban, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this ‘rising authoritarianism’ is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here]
After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and reddits of the Internet and ‘expose’ a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase ‘dark undercurrent’ a lot. Quote Murray Bookchin. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the 1930s who became fascists. Mutter darkly about ‘blood and soil’ and how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? It makes you think. If you’re lucky.
Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the ‘new threat to democracy’ which is represented by this ominous movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either [a] a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or [b] a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, ‘global justice’ and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of ‘problematic’ views, more work to tackle ‘radicalisation’, more ‘hate speech’ or anti-protest laws and probably more Internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.
The problem, though, is that actual ‘eco fascism’ is notable mostly by its absence. Dark corners of the Internet aside – you can find any craziness there, after all – it’s hard to find a single ‘eco fascist’ anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course – without the prefix, the word ‘fascist’ has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades – but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time, but I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.
So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.
RED
By now, you might have heard about the rising threat of ‘eco-fascism’. If you haven’t you soon will, because the number of people warning about this alarming new danger to civilisation seems to be growing exponentially. In publications right and left and neither you’ll be able to read long expositions of the origins and intentions of this frightening movement, which seems to be taking root all over the world.
Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems like they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the ‘rising tide of authoritarianism’ all over the world, as evidenced by ‘populism’, Brexit, Georgia Melloni, Viktor Orban, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this ‘rising authoritarianism’ is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here]
After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and reddits of the Internet and ‘expose’ a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase ‘dark undercurrent’ a lot. Quote Murray Bookchin. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the 1930s who became fascists. Mutter darkly about ‘blood and soil’ and how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? It makes you think. If you’re lucky.
Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the ‘new threat to democracy’ which is represented by this ominous movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either [a] a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or [b] a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, ‘global justice’ and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of ‘problematic’ views, more work to tackle ‘radicalisation’, more ‘hate speech’ or anti-protest laws and probably more Internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.
The problem, though, is that actual ‘eco fascism’ is notable mostly by its absence. Dark corners of the Internet aside – you can find any craziness there, after all – it’s hard to find a single ‘eco fascist’ anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course – without the prefix, the word ‘fascist’ has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades – but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time, but I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.
So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.
The US megadrought won’t just end – it will change the land forever
Patterns of drought and deluge are common throughout history, but human-driven climate change is disrupting these cycles, making it more difficult to predict exactly how the current megadought in south-western North America will end
Getty Images/Bloomberg Creative/ David Paul Morris
The current drought began when Kent Norman was just 2 years old. Farming is in his blood. His family has worked the land in Stockton, California, for generations. But the last two decades have created one of the most severe droughts in the region history: Over the course of his life, south-western North America has become drier than it has been in more than 1000 years.
Cascadia Forest Defenders 1995
100th day of resistance at the Warner Creek Blockade. The original Cascadia Forest Defenders celebrate like the bad asses they were and some still are.
World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies
Key UN reports published in last two days warn urgent and collective action needed – as oil firms report astronomical profits
What is solarpunk and can it help save the planet?
Lush green communities with roof top gardens, floating villages, transport fuelled by clean energy and hope-filled sci-fi tales. Imagine a world in which existing technologies are deployed for the greater good of both people and the planet.
Burn Wild
For more than a decade two mugshots of fugitive environmentalists have sat amongst airplane hijackers, bombers and murders on the FBI’s Most Wanted Domestic Terrorists list.
One of the photos is of a tall, hipster looking engineer from Seattle. He’s wearing a red shirt, has a light shadowy beard.
His name: Joseph Mahmoud Dibee.
The other photo is of a young white woman with thick eyebrows, piercing brown eyes and long brown hair. Across her back is a large tattoo: a bird with its wings outstretched, soaring.
Her name: Josephine Sunshine Overaker.
To the authorities, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee and Josephine Sunshine Overaker are dangerous, violent extremists, part of an eco-terrorist movement that in 2005 the then Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI called the number one domestic terror threat in America.
And now one of them – Joseph Dibee – has been caught.
For the past eighteen months journalist Leah Sottile has been recording with Joe Dibee as his case progresses through the courts and as she works to understand the truth behind the mugshots and how they ended up here.
Burn Wild is a story of radical environmentalism and morality that journeys into one of the most thorny and murky questions of our time: How far is too far to go to stop the planet burning?
Answering this will take Leah and producer Georgia Catt into radical activist communities past and present on both sides of the Atlantic, amongst people who’ve spent their lives running from the authorities, and those who carry the weight of that word – terrorist – on their shoulders.
In this story people will take away very different things on what they hear, but where you sit isn’t a question of the past. It’s a question of right now.
‘Soon the world will be unrecognisable’: is it still possible to prevent total climate meltdown?
