Today is Earth Day. Happy Earth Day everyone. The Earth is not happy, is it?


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Logic - one must also understand the problem to be able to resolve it.

Today is Earth Day.

Happy Earth Day everyone.

The Earth is not happy, is it?

Everything I mention below by way of a nurturing behavioural dynamic becoming implemented as our global cultural dynamic is within the realms of possibility, and therefore there is both a practical and feasible path towards a happy Earth.

It is important to remember you and I were born into a culture that was a bully cult and that you and I did not create it.

It was truly scuppered before you I was born. It was scuppered long before any of us alive were born. And it's also true that some people are continuing to cause a lot of harm, and things are getting worse as a result. 

The core behavioural dynamic is externalising costs. That is evading the costs, impacts and harms of an activity engaged in, - Fossil Fuel Use, for example - by masking those costs, by ignoring those costs in Risk Assessments, by bribing policy makers to ignore those costs, by placing corporate employees into Government, by the costs do not exist, by denying the costs are linked to the activity - in essence the adverse impacts are kept external to the money transaction, the profit efficiency is maximised at every stage, from extraction of the Oil and Gas, to it's distribution, sale and consumption and it's waste products at every stage. Part of the activity is to gaslight anyone who becomes aware of these costs and starts to ask questions.

Did you know that the concept of a personal carbon footprint was popularised by BP in a 2004/5 marketing campaign that cost close to $1000,000,0000?

"The oil giant British Petroleum (BP) actually hired PR professionals to invent a concept designed to blame individuals, not fossil fuel companies, for climate change. And it was BP that revealed the phrase "carbon footprint", along with a "carbon footprint calculator", in 2004."

source : https://interestingengineering.com/carbon-footprint-coined-by-big-oil-to-blame-you-for-climate-change

As I wrote above, the system was already toxic before either you or I was born. The costs of slavery were externalised. The costs of every Monarchs Wealth have always been always externalised. The costs of every war is externalised. People and environment endure those costs, both suffer and die from those costs, and the costs are neither prevented nor are they paid for by the profiteers.

Climate Disruption is an externalised cost of the Fossil Fuel Industry. Environmental Degradation is an externalised cost of Industrial Farming and Industrial Fishing practice. Particulate Pollution is an externalised costs of the combustion engine industry. PTSD is an externalised cost of Invasion and Warfare.

The question is this - would you like to help clean all this up? Is that what you'd like your children to inherit? The results of your best efforts to make the changes needed so that polluters pay the full costs and to prevent the problems they are causing. Think of your children and their contemporaries. Even if you don't have children, you do have a shared human adult responsibility to all the children.

Problems.

Climate Disruption is happening.

Pollution is continuing.

Environmental Degradation is a  constant.

Militarism is rampant, and wasteful.

Wealth Extraction and Concentration is the dominant economic and political dynamic, held in place by coercion.

Climate Disruption is more accurate than Climate Change. The climate has been disrupted. Industrial activity in pursuit of extremes of profit  has caused the disruption.

What to do?

We can draw down and cease the current activity that is causing the most disruption, and and we can hope that the climate somehow balances itself. 

We know biological world can recover and adapt. Volcanoes teach us that. Life returns to the barren surface, seeded from the surrounding biota.

It will mean a fossil free system. It will mean regenerative farming. It will mean better insulation in British homes. It will mean the redesign of all industrial processes - and that ought to reduce pollution as well as reduce environmental degradation.

It will mean making adaptations to our culture to protect the vulnerable, everywhere. It will mean intentional adaptation to new conditions, which might fluctuate. We must remain  responsive rather than knee-jerk reactive.

Militarism must be ceased. Immediately. Really. It is barbarism. Nothing more. This will take some time, and it must be started as soon as possible. Demilitarisation is critical to our shared futures.

Wealth Extraction and concentration as a Power base must be ceased. Wealth must be shared equitably. No question. vast wealth must be subject to legislative regulation that reduces those concentrations and limits their political and economic power to influence Governance.

These are all possible goals, albeit improbable whilst those who maintain Wealth Extraction and Concentration by coercion and manipulation, corruption and warfare remain in Power.

Wealth must be disenfranchised as a political movement. No question.

Egalitarian principles are already very well understood in human social philosophy and practice. There is nothing new in egalitarian social practice. This is not a matter of inventing something new, from the unknown.

The Earth is unhappy.

It doesn't have to be this way. It is not idealistic to think so, it is practical, humane and also obvious. That it is this way is clear, this is the way it is. And it doesn't have to be this way.

It is a very difficult time for everyone, as I know from my own direct lived experience right now, and from the multitudinous stories of the lived experience of billions of humans.

It has been this way for a while now, some 12,000 years. A friend recounted how he was travelling the Peruvian Hippie Trail, and he met and sat with some native folk, sharing a pot of tea and they were chatting, making amiable conversation, sharing stories and the conversation came round to the subject of 'end times'. My friend was worried about the 'end times' and very concerned, and he spoke of Hopi prophecies and other similar narratives.

The locals told him to not worry. "It's already happened! Our ancestors had seen the end of the world." History recounts that the end of their world had been brought to them through European colonisation, a violent conquest which commodified people and habitat alike to extract vast, vast wealth for Kings, Queens and their Oligarchs.

Which in turn led to rampant industrial raw material extraction with cheap hard labour the lot of the majority those who survived. Empires were built on the backs of enslaved peoples. European industrial power still stalks South America, as it does elsewhere. A lethal stalker. The history is well understood.

The Bully Cult.

That said, it is also true that the Bully Cultist cannot relax.

Every Bully Cult lives on edge, knowing that sooner or later the majority will respond, and it wont' be kind.

We will be kind. That is who we are. And we will be robust - we must. We have no other rational choice. Our children's future Earth days in time will be a celebration of having achieved these goals listed above.

Happy Earth Day. Let's get to work.


My version of Katie Goodman's song "I did not Fuck It Up!"

"There has never been a time..
There has never been a time...
there has never been a time -
As fucked up as this!

I did not fuck it up, 
You?You probably did not fuck it up!
They whoever they are, they really fucked it up,
Now we're all fucked.

I cannot unfuck all this up!
You, you probably can't unfuck all this up!
And if we're waiting for them, whoever they are to unfuck this up, 
then We're all fucked!

Would I pick one thing to do, to help unfuck it up?
Would you pick one thing to do, to help un-fuck it up?
Let's all pick on thing to do, to help un-fuck it up - 
Let's get to work.

Chorus - everybody sings along, with gusto and delight!

I want to be a un-fucker!
I want to be a un-fucker!
I want to be a un-fucker!
Un-fuck it up!"

Sarah Goodman

Kindest regards


Cornilius

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