Earth thought 148 of 365: Inaccuracy hinders climate change debate to no small extent. The U.S. general public contains far too many who no longer know -or never learned- the scientific method and who are clueless about scientific peer review. They accept the ranting of both climate skeptics and climate apocalyptics without critical scrutiny. It is maddening, to try to debate with someone who thinks a scientific position is like an opinion or who thinks we've made no improvements in accuracy since we thought the Earth was flat and the Church suppressed science. Our educational systems are to blame, and a shameless media that drags its critical function low into "infotainment" (a word the formally displays the stupidity it denotes).
Earth thought 149 of 365: "Some things are better than others." Like health. It's better than sickness. But does health apply to ecological wholes -to ecosystems, bioregions, or the biosphere as a whole?
Earth thought 150 of 365: It is striking that mainstream, U.S. culture has no convention -like marriage, or swearing into office- by which a person commits her or himself to environmental stewardship. Do the mainstream religions have such a convention, or rite? How odd this vacuum of responsibility is, when you think about it.
Earth thought 151 of 365: Seeing cars backed up willy nilly on the interstate as they return from Chesapeake Bay. What's wrong with this picture? The absence of light rail.
Earth thought 152 of 365: Nature's pretty. Oh, we know. But the ugliness is just -even more- powerful. And what do you learn from it? And is it about you?
Earth thought 153 of 365: The "Anthropocene" -a proposed name for the geological era of homo sapiens. Eras usually span millions of years, and homo sapiens has yet to get anywhere near a million, much less a quarter of a million, or even a tenth? So what gives? Judged by our effect, though, we are a geological era in a sliver of time, like a meteor strike or a chain of volcanic eruptions. The Earth's become totally different after we struck. But an era? Perhaps not, perhaps we are more like an event, an eruption, a flash disturbance that opens some million on million year era we can hardly imagine, nor even name. I hope not, though. I hope we are in the anthropocene -for millions of years. First we were a spastic, wild event, changing everything. That took a mere 10,000 years, with most happening in a few hundred. Then, we got a grip of ourselves and became the first animals to tend to the biodiverse world, living with its wild life.
Earth thought 154 of 365: Hope is an important element of environmental activism -or at least it should be. I wish there were a name for the hope involved in claiming responsibility and acting on it -the hope that comes with agency. This isn't a hope that fantasizes a wish fulfilled, or covers one's world with sparkly treats. It is hardly dissociable from action, on the edge of the underside of action as you feel yourself effecting change -making what is a little bit into what should be, of setting the order straight. Kant called something like this hope a condition of action as such.
Earth thought 155 of 365: In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hanna Arendt proposed that evil in political-economies of scale, such as totalitarian ones, is “banal”, by which she meant a result not of diabolical intentions but of organized thoughtlessness. Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes shows how banal irresponsibility with massive effects really is. Consider –the Gulf Oil spill currently risking the long-term destruction of the Gulf of Mexico’s life-systems appears to have been a result of organized corporate irresponsibility.
