Oct 30, 2012 | Climate Change/Environment
The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, but climate change has decided to speak to them. And what is a thousand-mile-wide storm pushing eleven feet of water toward our country’s biggest population center saying just days before the election? It is this: we are all from New Orleans now. Climate change—through the measurable rise of sea levels and a documented increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms—has made 100 million Americans virtually as vulnerable to catastrophe as the victims of Hurricane Katrina were seven years ago.
Oct 27, 2012 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
Our record of success is not that long. In any case, past successes are no guarantee of the future. But it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the imagination to avoid it. To send humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to the earth. To have the potential but to be unable to use it—to be, in the end, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish. It would be evidence that Lynn Margulis’s most dismissive beliefs had been right after all. For all our speed and voraciousness, our changeable sparkle and flash, we would be, at last count, not an especially interesting species.
Oct 21, 2012 | Climate Change/Environment
After years of being a therapist and a mother, I’ve learned that shouting “wake up” doesn’t work. One of my most dispiriting realizations was that while I wanted desperately to preserve the world I loved, I didn’t even know how to share this fact with my closest friends.
Oct 20, 2012 | Society In Decline
When it comes to our understanding of the unfolding global crisis, each of us seems to fit somewhere along a continuum of awareness that can be roughly divided into five stages:
Oct 18, 2012 | Carolyn's Interviews, Feature Articles
Carolyn is interviewed on Blog Talk Radio speaking about the evolutionary shift occurring within the human and earth communities
Oct 18, 2012 | Emotional/Spiritual
We share this world — the good Earth. We are a part of it; we have sprung from it; we give back to it when we die. This symbiosis is all that is truly real.
Oct 5, 2012 | Energy Depletion
Extreme energy will mean an extreme planet….All these processes have at least one thing in common: each pushes the envelope of what is technically possible in extracting oil (or natural gas) from geologically and geographically forbidding environments. They are all, that is, versions of “extreme energy.” To produce them, energy companies will have to drill in extreme temperatures or extreme weather, or use extreme pressures, or operate under extreme danger — or some combination of all of these. In each, accidents, mishaps, and setbacks are guaranteed to be more frequent and their consequences more serious than in conventional drilling operations. The apocalyptic poster child for these processes already played out in 2010 with BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and this summer we saw intimations of how it will happen again as a range of major unconventional drilling initiatives — all promising that “golden age” — ran into serious trouble.
Oct 4, 2012 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
Only in crisis do human beings actually change anything. If there is any demarcation with profound implications going forward, it isn’t the line between the 1% and the 99% or the line dividing the Status Quo into two safely complicit ideological camps: it is the divide between those who squarely face the burden of knowing the present is unsustainable and those who flee into the comforts of denial. Those who accept the burden of knowing are part of the solution, those who cling to denial are part of the problem.