Category Archives: current events

Global Conversations on Earth Day

 

ALSO:
Appalachian Voice commemorates #EarthDay events on solar and litter pickup, and a screening of Tom Hansell’s After Coal this evening at 6. Visit https://AppVoices.org/earth-day-2020

A virtual earth day 2020

On the 50th anniversary of the original Earth Day — which took place  April 22, 1970 — the world’s religious, scientific and cultural leaders are standing together, especially in the face of a global pandemic, demanding that governments organize intelligently for the future of everyone and everything on Earth.

The Earth Day organization itself — at earthday.org — was initially planning for millions of people gathering in person worldwide.   With the COVID-19 crisis, that is no long possible.

Denis Hayes

“The Earth Day Network staff is working its collective tail off trying to stitch together a significant online stream event that is interesting and educational and inclusive,” said Denis Hayes, a lead organizer in the original Earth Day 1970.  It’s disappointing that it has to be virtual, he said in a recent interview with Inside Climate News. “In terms of political impact, there is simply no substitute for a billion people in the streets.”  In a Seattle Times Op-Ed, Hayes wrote:

The 2020 election will determine whether America will come again to cherish sound science, respect expertise, revere innovators and assume its leadership role in protecting the planet from climate devastation. Essentially, all climate scientists agree that we are approaching irreversible tipping points that threaten to permanently impoverish not just the human prospect but the entire web of life.

Still, virtual events have their own dynamic and advantages. For example, an interfaith religious service was held Sunday April 19 at -5 UTC with leaders from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Latter-Day Saints, Muslim, Sikh, Unitarian Universalist and other spiritual communities sharing their traditions’ gifts through sacred text, commentary, and song, and call us to collective action. It was streamed through the National Cathedral and  Interfaith Power and Light’s virtual link.  A similar service will be held Wednesday April 22.

 

“You may laugh, but your grandkids will not.”

That’s one response from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to critics who have been trying to mock the Green New Deal resolution of Feb. 2, and we think it shows her admirable determination in the face of the very catastrophe that the critics are hastening. Here’s a more detailed video advocating the Green New Deal.

It’s useful to recall that similar criticism greeted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original “New Deal” in the 1930s. It was “anti-God,” said fascist priest Charles Coughlin. It was communistic or socialistic, said others who were so well off they did not understand the pain of joblessness and hunger during those years. But the New Deal lifted the country out of the Depression and provided a long term structure for the economy in situations where laissez-faire policies had led to economic deterioration.

Similar laissez-faire polices have led not only to environmental deterioration in general but a very specific and catastrophic threat: climate change, rising sea levels and extreme weather. It’s a deep crisis unlike anything we have ever faced. To laugh in its face, to deny the science, to mock attempts to engage in dialogue, is nothing short of a nihilistic and reckless disregard for the facts.

So AOC is right to say that the grandchildren won’t be laughing.

Read the 14-page document that describes the current environmental crisis, addresses economic and health issues, and then advocates steps towards renewable zero emission power. There’s nothing radical or strange in advocating renewable technology and conservation. What’s wrong is pretending there is no need for a response, and that future generations will be fine if we just do nothing.

Another environmentalist murdered

Canadian-Iranian professor Kavous Seyed Emami, founder of  the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, was killed by the government of Iran on Feb. 8, 2018, in a solitary confinement cell in Iran,  after his arrest on espionage charges Jan. 24.

Although the government of Iran claims that Emami hung himself, his family and world human rights groups reject the official Iranian cause of death as false.  The accelerating pace of global murders of environmentalists is an increasingly dire human rights issue.

See: “Remembering Murdered Environmentalists,”  this web site; also, Roger Cohen,  New York Times, Feb. 14, 2018 and an article by the  Center for Human Rights in Iran 

The Fukushima disaster keeps getting worse

By   
Professor and Director, Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University, 
Via The Conversation 

Six years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011, but Japan is still dealing with its impacts. Decommissioning the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant poses unprecedented technical challenges. More than 100,000 people were evacuated but only about 13 percent have returned home, although the government has announced that it is safe to return to some evacuation zones.

In late 2016 the government estimated total costs from the nuclear accident at about 22 trillion yen, or about US$188 billion – approximately twice as high as its previous estimate. The government is developing a plan under which consumers and citizens will bear some of those costs through higher electric rates, taxes or both. Continue reading

Fake news and climate change

 Fake news needs to be curbed through targeted advertising boycotts, according to writers of recent  opinion articles in Slate and the New York Times.  A prime example: a Breitbart story about global “cooling” that misuses Weather Channel information. (See WC response video, right),

Consumer activism against Brietbart and other fake news sites is being organized at a Twitter site called Sleeping Giants, with the idea that most commercial companies are only accidentally placing ads on the sites.  According to the site:

We are trying to stop racist websites by stopping their ad dollars. Many companies don’t even know it’s happening. It’s time to tell them.

Sleeping Giants recommends that a screenshot of a commercial ad placed next to   Continue reading

Death toll rising in global war on environmentalism

United Nations envoy says the pattern of killings has become an epidemic. (UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré)

Three Central American  assassinations in the first three weeks of March 2016, and three more in the summer and fall, underscore the mounting global death toll in the war being waged against peaceful environmental protests by mining, timbering and hydro-electric industries.

The assassinations signal a “growing epidemic” according to a United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz.

Waterkeeper Alliance president Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called on the US State Department and international organizations to investigate.

“Ordinary citizens and local communities are increasingly finding themselves at the forefront of the battle over the planet’s natural resources,” Global Witness spokesman Billy Kytes said.

The three Central American activists are among hundreds named and described here on the Environmental History Timeline page Remembering Murdered Environmentalists.

The toxic history of lead

cropped-1.5.Franklin.jpg

The recent outrage over lead contamination in the water supply of Flint, Mich. reminds us of how much is known about the history of  lead poisoning.

In 1786, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter about the harmful effects of lead. In describing the problem in distilleries and the printing trades, Franklin noted how resistant people can be when it comes to understanding public health and environmental issues.

You will observe, with concern, how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on,” he said.

Although it hardly seems creditable, the useful truth about lead in the form of paint, water pipes, and leaded gasoline is still not practiced.

Lead is the oldest and best known of environmental hazards.For over two millennia, overexposure to lead was known to cause hallucinations and severe mental problems. Continue reading

2015 in review

Pope and Obama

US President Obama greets Pope Francis at the White House in September, 2015.

Pope Francis’ campaign to stop climate change and the Dec. 12 Paris climate agreement were the two top environmental developments in a year that marked a turning point for the environment  and renewable energy.

Environmental Health News put the two  at the top of its list, as did Huffington Post,  Deutche Welle,  the Conversation and others.

“It was an outstanding year for the environment,” said Deutche Welle.

“Call it the grand convergence,” said Douglass Fischer of Environmental Health News. “Coverage of environmental issues, especially climate change, jumped traditional boundaries to pick up broader—and slightly ominous—geopolitical and health angles.”

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Pope Francis’ long-awaited climate encyclical

June 18, 2015 — ROME —  Pope Francis has issued an extraordinary  environmental statement   calling for environmental justice between the generations and dialogue in the international community. In one portion he says:  165. We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay. 

 The full statement is found at a Vatican website here. The statement begins:           ——————

“LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs. ”(#1 Cantico delle creature: Fonti Francescane (FF) 263. )

St. Francis

2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters…

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