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Scientists on where to be in the 21st century based on sustainability

Scientists on where to be in the 21st century based on sustainability

Preface. The article below is based on Hall & Day’s book “America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions: Surviving the 21st Century Megatrends”. Related articles:

Day, J. W., et al. Oct 2013. Sustainability and place: How emerging mega-trends of the 21st century will affect humans and nature at the landscape level.  Ecological Engineering.

Five scientists have written a peer-reviewed article about where the best and worst places will be in the future in America based on how sustainable a region is when you take into account climate change, energy reserves, population, sea-level rise, increasingly strong hurricanes, and other factors.  Three of the scientists, John W. Day, David Pimentel, and Charles Hall, are “rock stars” in  ecology. Below are some excerpts from this 16 page paper that I found of interest (select the title above to see the full original paper).

Best places to be

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Absolute Futility of ‘Global Dominance’ in the 21st Century

The Absolute Futility of ‘Global Dominance’ in the 21st Century

It seems certain that the foolish chest-pounders now in charge of our nation have found a time machine to transport them back to 19th century where they have decided to mimic the slogan of faded English imperialism that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” How else to explain their recent proclamations that the United States must have “global energy dominance” and “American dominance in space”? Calling for global dominance in the 21st century, with 7 billion humans on the planet and only 325 million Americans — about 4 percent — is not only inane, it’s dangerous and absolutely futile.

Leading the pack on the call for “global energy dominance” is none other than former Montanan Ryan Zinke, now secretary of the Interior in the Trump administration. Of course Zinke has yet to explain why we should drill, frack, mine and export every possible source of fossil fuel in our nation. Nor has he detailed any benefits that will accrue to the populace from such a policy.

What we do know is that Trump and Zinke are willing to destroy existing national monuments, wildlife refuges, seashores and endangered species to achieve their bizarre fantasy of global energy dominance.

One might well wonder why any nation would want to exhaust its own reserves of fossil fuels as quickly as possible knowing they are non-renewable. One might also wonder why selling off those resources to our global economic competitors makes any sense whatsoever. And finally, one might question why a man who rode his “America First” slogan to the White House wouldn’t take care of America first — instead of leaving us with the inevitable land, water and air pollution as well as the associated illnesses and deaths from massive fossil fuel energy production.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NATO: a Promoter of Colonialism in the 21stCentury

NATO: a Promoter of Colonialism in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century

NATO: a Promoter of Colonialism in the 21stCentury

Five NATO members continue to possess colonies. These NATO states have no intention of granting their territories independence any time soon. Not only does France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United States insist on maintaining vestiges of their colonial pasts, but their colonies have been interwoven into NATO’s military infrastructure.

The continued presence of French, British, Dutch, Danish, and American colonies around the world extends what is officially called the “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” to the South Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. If there was ever an organization guilty of blatantly deceptive advertising practices, it is NATO.

Recent attempts to secure more political autonomy in the French Caribbean territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana, the latter the home of a French space launch facility having strategic importance, have been met with everything from indifference in Paris or extreme hostility. A January 26, 1968 SECRET Central Intelligence Agency report warned against Soviet attempts to establish space tracking facilities in French Guiana. That same year, the Guiana Space Center was established at Korou in the French colony. NATO ordered the suppression of independence moves by the people of Guiana to keep the center solely in the hands of France and the European Space Agency. In March and April 2017, populist tempers flared when Guianese protesters took over the Korou space facility over charges that France was ignoring the people of the colony. Youth unemployment, for example, is at a staggering 55 percent.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Rise and Fall of Fantasy

The Rise and Fall of Fantasy

Hay-on-Wye Festival Panel Discussion, With Ted Honderich — Who Reports on It — and David Aaronovitch and Edwina Currie
To Hay-on-Wye the other day I went, to the more intellectual of the two festivals, the one with music as well, the festival gnomically namedHow The Light Gets In by its creator and benefactor Hilary Lawson of the family Lawsons. Of Nigel, once Chancellor of the Exchequer and Boom and Bust and latterly of Global Cooling, Nigella cooking beautifully on the telly, and lovely witty Vanessa married to A. J. Freddie Ayer of Language, Truth and Logic.

Having tired out myself and my temper at 10 am and thereafter in my philosopher’s report to a large audience on what it was for them to be conscious, unaided in my report by the audience lecture handout  that did not find its way to the tent despite having been sent to Hay in advance three times, I found myself in another tent at 12 considering another subject, or anyway words. These words were as follows.

“Once we paraded grand visions of the future, now such goals are more typically left to the fanatical fringe. With economic and cultural growth in the East, what vision does the West have to offer?  Do we need new fantasies to meet the challenges of the 21st Century or is our scepticism a sign of wisdom rather than decline?”

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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