As our social contract lies in tatters, our community bonds are further rended, and ruling elites do nothing but hasten the ecological holocaust, acts of self-destruction are only going to increase.
Just found this through your comment on Chris Hedges' latest post... And whoa! This is hands down one of the most hard-hitting articles I've read lately. Not just for how you humanised each and every one of these people and their motivation, but also how you put everything into a wider context of imperialism and capitalism.
So many *try* to speak of the same, but only offer half solutions at best, shy of poking the lion too much and calling things for what they are, a monstrous product of unbridled capitalism that exploited and extracted every single drop from the essence of our being ("our" as in human and non-human life forms and our entire natural world). You speak clearly and loudly about dismantling our entire way of being that grew in an unsustainable, unacceptable direction. Thank you for that. This is an article I'll keep returning to over and over again.
These are very sad cases. I think self-immolation is a fitting summary of the current climate movement.
The science justifies none of the panic that inspired these actions. Projections of future warming are speculative at best, and recent warming is less than projected by the models cited by the IPCC from 1995 to 2000. Even if warming increases, resulting environmental damage is likely to be modest, and impacts on human life even less. On the other hand, eliminating use of fossil fuels to attempt to prevent further warming will cause drastically reduced standards of living in the developed world, while condemning billions in poor countries to perpetual and increased poverty.
The world is in better condition, in terms of human quality of life and environmental health, than it has been for generations. There is room for continued improvement, but there is no reason for panic or despair.
Have just revisited this, and it rings truer than ever. Thanks for your writing, I appreciated it then and now.
"The question, then, is not how we will live, but how we will die."
Excellent reporting. The past repeats itself here; long lives the war machine.
Just found this through your comment on Chris Hedges' latest post... And whoa! This is hands down one of the most hard-hitting articles I've read lately. Not just for how you humanised each and every one of these people and their motivation, but also how you put everything into a wider context of imperialism and capitalism.
So many *try* to speak of the same, but only offer half solutions at best, shy of poking the lion too much and calling things for what they are, a monstrous product of unbridled capitalism that exploited and extracted every single drop from the essence of our being ("our" as in human and non-human life forms and our entire natural world). You speak clearly and loudly about dismantling our entire way of being that grew in an unsustainable, unacceptable direction. Thank you for that. This is an article I'll keep returning to over and over again.
These are very sad cases. I think self-immolation is a fitting summary of the current climate movement.
The science justifies none of the panic that inspired these actions. Projections of future warming are speculative at best, and recent warming is less than projected by the models cited by the IPCC from 1995 to 2000. Even if warming increases, resulting environmental damage is likely to be modest, and impacts on human life even less. On the other hand, eliminating use of fossil fuels to attempt to prevent further warming will cause drastically reduced standards of living in the developed world, while condemning billions in poor countries to perpetual and increased poverty.
The world is in better condition, in terms of human quality of life and environmental health, than it has been for generations. There is room for continued improvement, but there is no reason for panic or despair.