Skip to content

Earth

Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Call To Higher Consciousness

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a call to higher consciousness, and it is one that is not solely defined by human beings but emerges from the original instructions of what the Lakota people also call wotakuye (relations with all life). Lakota children are taught that the earth is their grandmother, and that they are participants in her story. She gives us life, shelter, food, warmth, joy, and many other gifts. In contrast, the settler-colonial was taught that Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth) was property and meant for exploitation and one’s capitalist ambitions. However, it is time for the settler colonial to divest from this concept, to listen to Indigenous voices, and invest in Unci Maka as a relative that deserves inherent respect, honor, and reverence.

Love Letter For Our Afflicted Earth

Dear Earth, in this journey that we call our existence, we produce, consume, we eat, drink, breathe and survive because you are the very essence of life.   Your voice is clearer than our words, stronger than our laws, and more just than our principles. How do we renew the promises of our Original Trust, and restore the confidence that you gave to past generations? Dear Earth, this Original Trust is an agreement. You have whispered its many names and have warned us of deep contradictions in our understanding of that trust. Now a poison threatens you, us, our home. Its identity might be cloaked but its name is not a mystery. Some have listened, but mostly we have ignored the signs. We have inflicted a deep wound on our own house, and don’t seem to know how or if we will heal. We stand for justice and liberty, but too often brought to our knees by tyranny, alienation and frustration. How do we come to shiver under the hypocrisy of our own principles in practice? 

‘Saving Life On Earth’ For Just $100 Billion: New Roadmap Shows How US Can Address Global Extinction Crisis

As the United Nations unveiled Monday a draft proposal to address threats to biodiversity, a new report outlined a strategy for U.S.-focused "visionary action to save life on Earth." The roadmap (pdf) was released Monday by the Center for Biological Diversity. It lays out specific steps for the United States to help end the global extinction crisis. From the ongoing "insect apocalypse" to the deterioration of "ecosystems on which we and all other species depend" to the hurtling of roughly one million plant and animal species to the brink of extinction...

War Is War On Mother Earth

There is the close relationship between war and climate change that can be seen in a cycle of feedback loops creating the interlocking crisis. Take the case of Syria, the perfect example with its direct relationship between war and drought. In an exacting statistical analysis of wars fought between 1980 and 2010 the connection between war and climate change is undeniable. The US military itself has long recognized climate change as a “threat multiplier.” The last three Pentagon Quadrennial Defense Reviewscharacterized climate change as a threat to national security.[1]

Human Delusion and Our Destruction of the Biosphere: We Aren’t Even Trying!

The most casual perusal of the evidence in relation to what is happening to Earth’s biosphere – as distinct from the propaganda that is endlessly promulgated in the global elite’s corporate media – clearly indicates that the cataclysmic assault on our biosphere in a wide range of synergistic ways is now driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history and that, as a direct result of our relentless and rampaging destruction of habitat, it will take down humanity with it. Well within 10 years.

Saying Goodbye To Planet Earth

The spectacular rise of human civilization—its agrarian societies, cities, states, empires and industrial and technological advances ranging from irrigation and the use of metals to nuclear fusion—took place during the last 10,000 years, after the last ice age. Much of North America was buried, before the ice retreated, under sheets eight times the height of the Empire State Building. This tiny span of time on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old is known as the Holocene Age. It now appears to be coming to an end with the refusal of our species to significantly curb the carbon emissions and pollutants that might cause human extinction. The human-induced change to the ecosystem, at least for many thousands of years, will probably make the biosphere inhospitable to most forms of life.

Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?

Is Earth the largest garbage dump in the Universe? I don’t know. But it’s a safe bet that Earth would be a contender were such a competition to be held. Let me explain why. This article provides reasonably comprehensive summary of the types of garbage being generated (focusing particularly on those that are less well known), the locations into which the garbage is being dumped and some indication of what is being done about it and what you can do too. As noted by Baher Kamal: ‘Though some forms of pollution have been reduced as technologies and management strategies have advanced, approximately 19 million premature deaths are estimated to occur annually as a result of the way societies use natural resources and impact the environment to support production and consumption.’ And that is just the cost in human lives.

Humans Are Most Destructive Species On Earth

By Pratap Antony for Counter Currents. We have been around for only 200,000 years – Archaeologists have calculated that humans originated about 200,000 years ago in the Middle Palaeolithic period in southern Africa, and migrated out of Africa around 70,000 years ago and began colonizing the entire planet. We spread to Eurasia around 40,000 years ago (there is no geologic boundary between Europe and Asia – so they are combined as Eurasia.) and Oceania (roughly Australia to Fiji), and reached the Americas just 14,500 years ago. Humans are a member of a species of bipedal primates. We walk upright. We also have opposable thumbs so we can grip ‘things’. We have, what we think of as a highly developed brain. And so, we have called ourselves ‘homo sapiens’. In Latin, “Homo” means “man” and “Sapiens” means “wise”. Wise Men.

Looking To The Earth Itself As A Climate Solution

By Georgina Gustin for Inside Climate News - As President Obama scrambles to seal his climate legacy before he leaves office, his administration is taking a serious look downward—at soil. The administration is intent on developing its plan to meet the emissions reductions goals it agreed to in last year's Paris climate accord, and that plan will likely outline how farmland, with its huge potential to sequester carbon, will play a key role.

Earth Overshoot Day Is Aug 8, 2016

By Staff of TRANSCEND Media Service - We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than forests can sequester. Explore Solutions. Thriving lives within the means of our planet is not out of our reach. In addition to the focus on transforming our energy systems as highlighted by the Paris Climate Agreement, we see three major areas of opportunity for improving sustainability: food, cities, and population.

The Pentagon’s War On The Earth

By Tom H. Hastings for Peace Voice - But our fighting forces—and their attendant industries which manufacture the bombs, bullets, and ballistic delivery devices—also wage a war on the clean air, clean water, and clean soil many Americans falsely regard as protected by legislation fought for by those trying to protect our environment. Recent reports from around the country show the party most likely to toxify our land is our own military. These are just a small fraction of the reports from the past couple of weeks

Human Activity Ushers In New Geologic Epoch

By Sarah “Steve” Mosko for Boogie Green - By mid-twentieth century, humans had altered the Earth to such an extent as to mark the start of a new geologic epoch named the Anthropocene, concluded an international consortium of researchers in a January issue of the preeminent journal Science. Scientists divide Earth’s 4.5 billion year history into so-called epochs or time units based on major shifts in the composition and state of the planet as recorded in distinct stratifications in rocks, sediments and glacier ice. Previous transitions from one geologic epoch to the next were triggered by either cyclical drivers of climate change...

Rock Your Mocs To the MN Federal Court House

Follow Honor the Earth - "White Earth Nation v. Kerry. Plaintiffs, including the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, Honor the Earth and the Sierra Club, charge that the US State Department secretly approved Alberta Clipper aka the “switcheroo project,” skirting the environmental review required under the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) and the National Historic Preservation Act (“NHPA”). The State Department’s action has allowed Enbridge to switch lines at the border from the Alberta Clipper Line to an expanded and improved, (but aging) Line 3. The l6 mile border segment moves oil between the Clipper line and the Line 3 segment to, ostensibly, according to plaintiffs, avoid federal law. " When: Thursday, September l0 at 9:00 am

Soil Not Oil International Conference

By Soil Not Oil - Inspired by Dr. Vandana Shiva’s book, Soil Not Oil, the 2015 Soil Not Oil International Conference examines the crisis on food security while highlighting the role of oil-based agro-chemicals and fossil fuels in soil depletion and climate change. The conference will focus on practical carbon farming solutions including cover crops, planned grazing, compost application on range land, tree planting and other holistic land use practices. “We are pleased to host this important gathering in the San Francisco Bay Area, the heart of the organic food industry,” said Richmond-based John Roulac, founder and CEO of organic food leader Nutiva. “To secure a livable planet we need to both de-carbonize energy and re-carbonize our soils via regenerative agriculture.“

Humans Use Up Annual Share Of Earth’s Resources

By Emma Howard in The Guardian - Humans have exhausted a year’s supply of natural resources in less than eight months, according to an analysis of the demands the world’s population are placing on the planet. The Earth’s “overshoot day” for 2015, the point at which humanity goes into ecological debt, will occur on Thursday six days earlier than last year, based on an estimate by the Global Footprint Network (GFN). The date is based on a comparison of humanity’s demands – in terms of carbon emissions, cropland, fish stocks, and the use of forests for timber – with the planet’s ability to regenerate such resources and naturally absorb the carbon emitted. That implies the excess demands being placed on natural systems are doing more permanent harm that cannot be easily undone.
Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.