arctic peoples

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here’s posting it does just that

this changes everything capitalism vs the climate by naomi klein

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
Capitalism vs The Climate
by Naomi Klein

Gotta apologize, friends of Ma, outta here this long. Can’t let it go any longer. Much of these days for wifeling, helping her recover from deep surgery. Deeper than ever we saw coming.

No, can’t leave my readers alone, having just finished Naomi’s latest –One Great Work– page by page since Sept’s Peoples Climate March, ideally released just then. Powerful, humanly – scientifically – masterly gathered. How ’bout you ? Read it by now yourself, shemovesme friend ? Hope so. If not, do get right to it. You’ll soon know why.

Wifeling hears me go on & on about the book, concluding author must be something like another Rachel Carson. Clearly Rachel herself would be cheering. Naomi’s husband Avi Lewis is making TCE into a movie. Bravo, does it ever deserve it ! But please, reader, don’t wait for it.

No, no other words for it -for what we’re facing on this beautiful planet: TCE adds up to my most basic + my most advanced education for our Ma. Last few days I’m mulling just how to write it up . . . where to start, my pages & pages of underscoring nearly as many as Naomi’s originals. Seems I’m not alone at such a pen juncture. Rob Nixon started out with a similar baffle – here’s his own NY TIMES REVIEW 11/6/14

While we’re at it, if you’re looking for more reading clues, click here for another fine interview – bk review – auth review – pub excerpt at YES MAGAZINE – THE GUARDIAN – THE NATION – SIMON & SCHUSTER

And speaking of the Times, here’s TCE’s top 20 non-fiction rating story -just #12 in its 3rd wk, #17 4th wk following release. And that’s it; since then gone. Please Ma buddies – let’s go get it !

OK back to those pages, perhaps now far enuf away to begin hearing what sticks ( as if this aging memory of mine has anything like a last word ! )

First off, Naomi, it’s your sharp, energetic, forceful approach, creatively aligned for the best of reader engagement. I’m right with you from page one. You do get right to it, those first pages blatantly topside vs. easing your way up any ladder of speel for our planet.

We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth
– p 12

This well known target ( of world climate meetings ) has more to do with minimizing economic disruption than with protecting the greatest number of people.
– p 20

Before long, it’s so evident – what a journalist ! Your research – your energy – such non-stop probing, all taking us to the very source of Ma’s debacle – unfettered corporate ideology of the market. Oh my gosh, our turn to lose what we thought we’d won in that long, cool thrash of communism so-called vs democracy so-called.

Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. A belief system that vilifies collective action and declares war on all corporate regulation and all things public simply cannot be reconciled with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reigning in of the market forces that are largely responsible for creating and deepening the crisis.
– p 48

Talk about those corp deniers. You go right to it – to them, starting your book in person at their very conference. Then to the very ones -who doesn’t think so- right with us, the biggest of our environmental friends, their size attributable -wow- to those same fossil giants.

The Nature Conservancy has been in the oil and gas business ( itself ) for a decade and a half. That this could happen in the age of climate change points to a painful reality behind the environmental movement’s catastrophic failure to effectively battle the economic interests behind our soaring emissions: large parts of the movement aren’t actually fighting those interests -they have merged with them.
– p 208

But nowhere is it about anything like hate, as my own lens knows so well, this most authentic movement for our mother. It comes from the most natural love of her beauty, you two remind us . . .

I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
– quoting Rachel Carson herself ( 1954 ); TCE p 355

And speaking of our mother and what’s most authentic, the one time you seem to abandon a journalistic stand-off here you are connecting our planet’s fertility mission to your very own !

Finally what sticks is who you tab as earth’s best activists, known in your land as America’s first-nation folk, not only for their most natural affinity to our mother, but -admittedly most surprisingly- for such very real leadership from taking on their own land debacles to exiting courtrooms the winners. No wonder they were the very ones leading the rest of us down Broadway.

These victories add up: they have kept unaccountable millions of tons of carbon and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Whether or not climate change has been a primary motivator, the local movements behind them deserve to be recognized as unsung carbon keepers, who, by protecting their beloved forests, mountains, rivers, and coastlines, are helping to protect all of us.
– p 371

Naomi, I have to say in these final days of mine, presence at last is taking over. Here maine-coon Abby nestles beside me, dawn by smiling dawn, life itself so brightly in place, past any clouded yesterday. So it needs be.

I’ve always looked to Canada as America’s grounded northern conscience. Now, even as tarsands pulls your country down our lowest of corp undertakings, here you bring us home

to what’s happening, gifted planetwise;
to what’s so needed for our here & now.

naomi-beach6W72

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meltdown – terror at the top of the world

meltdown6H72F

TAKE A LOOK AT THIS EXCERPT from pulitzer winner INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS
seven american hikers on wilderness adventure in arctic tundra encounter polar bear’s plight
meltdown happening over us with very little doubt

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yes we could change . . .

So why don’t we ?

stop

sanford, florida under water

VERY FINE GLOBAL VIEW from paris by mort rosenblum of THE DAILY CLIMATE -from the first, my primary global climate news source here. mort was formerly spec correspondent with the associated press, and an ex-editor of the international herald tribune.

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oh canada . . .

How could you?

and to think numbers of us have been looking to you

CANADA FIRST NATION TO PULL OUT OF KYOTO PROTOCOL

principal locus of immediate global warming
home of arctic peoples, flora, fauna made to suffer our denials

nation whose very national character, pace, symbol
long centered the continent on sustaining life values

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we’ll get thru this too

Some good news about what’s ahead
in the very long run! . . .

crossing the bering strait

by Daily Mail Reporter, 11/20/11

Climate change over the past two million years has boosted human evolution by forcing us to adapt to changing conditions and allowing us to migrate to new areas. Researchers found that far from hindering our development, periods when the earth is either cooling or warming up have actually been highly beneficial. As well as prompting us to migrate, changes in climate have also forced humans to evolve culturally by encouraging us to learn to work together.

Far from hindering human development scientists now believe periods of climate change helped us evolve. Experts from the National History Museum and Cambridge University have identified five key time periods when shifts in global climate have resulted in accelerated social and genetic evolution.

The first began around two million years ago when a prolonged dry period caused forests to disappear leading to the emergence of Homo erectus – an early human adapted to running and hunting on the grassy plains.

The next major development came during the ice age which began 450,000 years ago during which scientists believe human beings were split into three separate groups. European humans evolved into Neanderthals while Asian humans evolved into Denisovans.

Those remaining on the African subcontinent evolved into modern human beings but this group had to wait until around 60,000 years ago when a prolonged warm spell allowed them to spread north. Then a sustained cold period between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago caused further changes as the freezing temperatures caused a 330ft drop in sea levels allowing humans to cross the Bering land bridge into North America.

Wild fluctuations in climate between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago prompted another period of change by forcing humans to develop agricultural techniques which enabled them to stabilise food supplies.

Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum and author of The Origin of Our Species told the Sunday Times: ‘Climate change has been a major player in our evolution.’ The Royal Society is holding a conference this week where details of recent research will be released. The scientists are keen to point out they are not suggesting that modern global warming is beneficial. Rhiannon Stevens of Cambridge University who is co-organising the conference told the newspaper: ‘What intrigues them is the growing evidence that human evolution and climate change have been inextricably linked for hundreds of thousands of years.’

Read more

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closer look: sara’s view from magnetic north

a world on top

getting down to the business at hand
so much these new books have to say
starting where three little maids left off

OK, not much little or maid-like here
sara’s epic winds eastward around the circle
starting & ending in russian siberia

best in your own words sara
as they strike home w/ such force
your TIPS ABOUT ICEBERGS one fine intro ( excerpted . . . )

The Arctic has been the locus of Armageddon two generations in a row now. It was the front line of the Cold War, with both sides pouring money into long-range nuclear bomber installations and lone figures crouching on floes straining to hear enemy subs ( or was that a ringed seal scratching its back? ). Nuclear holocaust, then apocalyptic climate change: something about the region attracts millennial anxiety. I picked up a scent among the Lappish reindeer and pursued it through the journeys described here. What does the Arctic tell us about our past? What does it reveal of the future?

. . . THE MAGNETIC NORTH  describes the semi-inhabited fringes of the Arctic: the transition zone. ” It’s not about polar bears, ” says Mary Simon, head of the Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents Canada’s forty-five thousand Inuit. ” It’s about people. “

Although the beauties and intractable problems of the contemporary Arctic framed my journeys, I could not ignore generations of explorers. Like the scientists who succeeded them, they went north to unlock secrets. Their adventures frequently descended into a tragic farce of shoe-eating ( when they ran out of food ) and poetic death, but still, heroic individual struggle is a theme of this book.

. . . I hit on the idea for a structure for my upcoming voyage. I would make a circular, counterclockwise journey – Siberia to Alaska to Canada to Greenland to Spitsbergen to Lapland and back to Russia, to the White Sea. The ends would not quite meet up. This would be a series of small journeys spread over two years, each planned to shed some dim light on the enigmas of the Arctic. Russia was a natural starting point, as it has more Arctic territory than any other country – five thousand miles of coastline that unspools from Europe to the Pacific, and a wilderness of tundra in which everything has evolved in response to cold.

. . . Twenty-six different ethnic peoples have herded and fished the Russian Arctic for centuries, yet they are invisible in most versions of the national past – unlike the dashing horsemen of the southern steppe or the turbanned anglers of Lake Baikal.

. . . Pollution, plunder, the gleeful killings of the Norse sagas – the Arctic is not a white Garden of Eden. All kinds of degradations crop up in the Inuit past: these pages contain a story of the deliberate, slow starvation of an orphan. And there is epic cruelty in the North.   ( Nevertheless ) . . . there was something indefinably redemptive folded up in the layers of Arctic mystery. Explorers, scientists, rogue writers – we were all on its tail.

In Ittoqqortoormiit, a municipality the size of Great Britain with a population of 562, a girl in Wrangler jeans and Nike sneakers drinks Coca-Cola with her sealskin-clad grandmother. Uncluttered polar landscapes reveal differences lost in the south. Semi-subsistence marine-mammal hunters still harpoon walrus in northwest Greenland, and if the solitary Inuit no longer stands motionless over a seal hole for twenty-four hours at a stretch, his father did.                    (   Compare the Comanche taming bison on the Plains. He is as remote as Odin. )  Above all else, the stripped-down Arctic exposes the way each country has treated its indigenous peoples. Every nation devastates native cultures, even if it doesn’t actually kill everyone off. Russians did it with bureaucracy, Americans with money, Canadians ( in the end ) with kindness. Swedes and Finns did it with chainsaws that chopped down forests. And everyone did it with booze and syphilis. Acculturation is a theme of  THE MAGNETIC NORTH.  It is a grim story, but I was not looking for a pretty picture. I was looking, in the words of T. S. Eliot, ” to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. “

. . . Both polar regions appeal to something visceral in the spirit, especially in an era when we have lost contact with the natural world. But in the Arctic, unlike its southern counterpart, there is a figure at the center of the picture. The Arctic is an image of the real world in all its degradation and beauty, and it is intimately connected to us – to our future, our crises, and our dreams. John Davis, the most sympathetic of Elizabethan navigators and a pioneering scientist in an era before science was partitioned off from everyday life, called the Arctic ” the place of greatest dignitie. ” As soon as I read that phrase, Davis entered my select group of polar heroes. I love the pared-down existence of polar lands and the grace of their peoples under pressure. 

the pared down existence of polar lands and the grace of their peoples under pressure . . .   you bring us along with such grace and forcefulness yourself, sara. I for one am not the same after accompanying you on your brave two-year round-about atop our world.