A world awash in greenwash

From today’s issue of The Guardian:

Republican senator Tom Cotton calls for vigilantism to break up Gaza protests

One can but presume the same approach would apply to MAGA protests surrounding the 2024 election. Does anyone know if liberals have started organizing people’s posses yet? Can you tell my mood today?

Blue Marble
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

I’m fed up with the malicious stupidity practiced by the human animal. Also from recent issues of The Guardian:

• Dead satellites are filling space with trash. That could affect Earth’s magnetic field
• In an unprecedented deal, a private company purchased land in a tiny Arizona town – and sold its water rights to a suburb 200 miles away. Local residents fear the agreement has ‘opened Pandora’s box’
• ‘Grownup’ leaders are pushing us towards catastrophe, says former US climate chief
• World faces ‘deathly silence’ of nature as wildlife disappears, warn experts

These articles can and should be stacked up against a definition of sustainability provided by Donella Meadows in February, 1995:

Humankind has the ability to achieve sustainable development — to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. 

In my own mind I supplement that official definition of sustainability with Herman Daly’s clear and undeniable explication of what it means in physical terms:

1. Renewable resources shall not be used faster than they can regenerate.

2. Pollution and wastes shall not be put into the environment faster than the environment can recycle them or render them harmless.

3. Nonrenewable resources shall not be used faster than renewable substitutes (used sustainably) can be develo ped.

By those conditions there’s not a nation, a company, a city, a farm, or a household on earth that is sustainable. Virtually every major fishery in the world violates condition 1. The world economy as a whole is violating condition 2 by putting out carbon dioxide 60-80% faster than the atmosphere can recycle it. But to make things worse, I would add two more sustainability conditions that I think are obvious.

4. The human population and the physical capital plant have to be kept at levels low enough to allow the first 3 conditions to be met.

5. The previous 4 conditions have to be met through processes that are democratic and equitable enough that people will stand for them.

Sustainability means all that to me and more, it means a complete vision of the world I want to work for and live in. It contains components of spirituality, of community, of decentralization, of a complete rethinking of the ways we use our time, define our jobs, and bestow power upon governments and corporations.

When was the last time you saw a news story addressing any of the five points? How about the “all that and more....?” Instead, we seem determined to keep rearranging the deck chairs as our only ship, spaceship Earth, continues to sink. Have I made it clear why my mood is what it is? One day very soon we’ll touch on what kinds of visions may help patch the leaks.

Earth Day

By Jane Yolen

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me.

Each blade of grass,

Each honey tree,

Each bit of mud,

And stick and stone

Is blood and muscle,

Skin and bone.

And just as I

Need every bit

Of me to make

My body fit,

So Earth needs

Grass and stone and tree

And things that grow here

Naturally.

That’s why we

Celebrate this day.

That’s why across

The world we say:

As long as life,

As dear, as free,

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me. 

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