Environment

Coal Worse Than Oil

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All eyes are on big oil these days, and for good reason, with possibly the worst oil spill in history happening as we watch. But coal, the other fossil fuel, is by far a worse culprit in the long run. From mining to processing to transportation to burning to disposal, coal has more environmental impacts than any other energy source. And we’re burning it everywhere in the U.S. — often without pollution-control equipment — even on our college campuses. Here in Wisconsin, a large percentage of our electricity has been produced with coal.

Environment

Noah, the Jubilee and the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster

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Come again? Isn’t Noah’s Ark a children’s story that only literalistic Christians think actually happened? And what relevance can that Jubilee story about making everyone equal every 50 years have to a modern economy? The Sabbath Year idea of not growing food one year in seven, and forgiving all debts: how would modern cities survive it? Those of us who dismiss the Bible in that way may not be aware of how much progressive political and moral inspiration has flowed from these stories.

Environment

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a passage entitled “The Cosmos and Revelation” from Islamic Spirituality: Foundations by philosopher and professor of Islamic studies Seyyid Hossein Nasr:

The revelation that comes from Him to Whom belong the heavens and the earth and all that is between them and below the earth also addresses itself to all these realms of the cosmic hierarchy as well as to man. The Quran is, in a sense, a Revelation unto the whole of creation, and one of its primary functions is to awaken in man an awareness of the Divine Presence in that other primordial revelation which is the created order itself. Primordial man saw the phenomena of nature in divinis, as the story of Adam in paradise reveals. Islam, in bestowing upon man access to this primordial nature and in addressing itself to the primordial man within every man, unveils once again the spiritual significance of nature and the ultimately theophanic character of the phenomena of the created order. It enables man to read once again the eternal message of Divine Wisdom written upon the pages of the cosmic text.

Environment

Earth Day 2010 in Wisconsin

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We had much to celebrate at “Earth Day at 40.” But, of course, we had much to concern us as well. The good news is that whenever we touched on “global weirding,” water rights, or any number of other environmental issues, someone at the conference offered ideas or solutions. These ranged from the most massive — a new electric grid across the United States — to the smallest and most local — digging up your lawn and planting raised beds with vegetables. And there was even better news — we all left the conference fired up to make a difference!

Earth-based Religions

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from a piece about Earth Day by Jeff Vogel, a respiratory therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York:
Earth Day 2010

All living things — large, small, and in between — share in the precious gift of life on Earth. However, it is we humans, with our large brains enabling us to be self-consciously aware of this gift, that are the only creatures to celebrate Earth Day. As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, let us remember that this grand unifying perspective was made possible by one of our nation’s greatest gifts to the world, the first stunning photo of Earth from outer space taken during the Apollo moon missions. This awesome image of our beautifully round whole Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space, may be humanity’s crowning achievement, the climax of our long collective urge to explore our surroundings. This new perspective of the Earth took our self consciousness to a whole new dimension.

Environment

Earth Day at 40 — From the Grass Roots in Wisconsin

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Spending the last two days at the “Earth Day at 40” conference has made me proud to be a Wisconsinite. There are many reasons why Wisconsin gave birth to Earth Day forty years ago. But the most important can be summed up in four names: John Muir, Frederick Jackson Turner, Aldo Leopold, and Gaylord Nelson. What an earth-loving tradition these four men created! John Muir — who grew up in Portage, Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin — went on to found the Sierra Club, help protect Yosemite Valley, and urge us all to passionately engage with wilderness.

Environment

Why Krugman is wrong about our economy's resilience

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I need to say more than I said yesterday about what is deeply wrong with this statement of Krugman’s:
If ours were a preindustrial, primarily agricultural society, extreme climate change would be obviously catastrophic. But we have an advanced economy, the kind that has historically shown great ability to adapt to changed circumstances. But first, I don’t want to be a doom-monger or to have Tikkun Daily too associated with predictions of doom. For reasons I don’t understand, but that are deep in Christian culture especially, European cultures have a strong affinity to predictions of doom. These seem to me to be connected to a dark view of human nature, as embodied in the Christian doctrine of original sin (which is not held by Jews or Muslims).

Environment

Is Krugman's "Building A Green Economy" Too Optimistic?

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There seems to be general praise from environmental blogs for Krugman’s major article on the economics of dealing with climate change in last Sunday’s New York Times. Krugman accepts the climate scientists’ consensus about the dangers of global warming and argues that it will actually be relatively cheap to prevent the worst of it happening. It’s been a hard week for me to do any research on this, with getting our next issue to press. So I haven’t had time to hunt around much and find anyone else having the same reaction I did to the article. Which was: Do Krugman and I live in the same planet as regards the effects of a nine degree rise in temperature by 2100?

Earth-based Religions

Permaculture and Paganism (3) — An Interview with Starhawk

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Permaculture is a movement whose time has arrived. We’re all concerned about “global weirding” (climate change), and according to Starhawk, permaculture offers a set of simple solutions to this problem. In my last post (and the accompanying video), Starhawk talked specifically about how permaculture would sequester carbon in the soil. Carbon Farmers of America is a group that’s taking this issue seriously. Star explained that they’re funding research to discover the best practices for large-scale building of soil and paying farmers for every ton of carbon dioxide they capture in new topsoil by marketing carbon sinks to the public to fund the work.

Earth-based Religions

Permaculture and Paganism, an Interview with Starhawk (1)

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Starhawk was generous with her time while she was here in Madison a month ago. She granted me two interviews, the first about Palestine and the second — which I will begin to post today now that I’m back from my vacation — about permaculture. For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. From the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, and since the 1990s she’s been most active in promoting permaculture.