Month: May 2021

Solar storms are back, threatening life on Earth as we know it

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter.

A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time — few people probably even knew it happened — but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.

“It is still remarkable to me the number of people, companies, who think space weather is Hollywood fiction,” said Caitlin Durkovich, a special assistant to President Joe Biden and senior director of resilience and response in the National Security Council, during a talk at a solar-weather conference last month.

 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/05/solar-storms-are-back-threatening-life-on-earth-as-we-know-it.html

New Maps-Deindustrial Fiction

New Maps- Deindustrial Fiction

If you’re reading this now, in these early stages of New Maps, you’ve probably found your way here from Joel Caris’s Into the Ruins or John Michael Greer’s blog Ecosophia. Thanks for coming. I’m excited to be starting this new project, and making sure good deindustrial fiction will keep getting out into the world.

The first issue of New Maps is planned for early this coming winter—I’m aiming for January of 2021. Until then, though, it’s not just all me. There are some things you can do to help make the first issue as terrific as I know it can be.

First and foremost, I’m looking for stories! If you’ve written for Into the Ruins, or if you always wanted to but never got to it before the last issue was announced, I want to hear from you. For that matter, I want to read your story even if you’ve just arrived here from none of the places I mentioned above, and you’ve never even heard of deindustrial fiction before, but you’re intrigued by what you see, and want to take a crack at writing some of it. Just head over to the contact and submissions page and get in touch.
I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the first year of New Maps. Each issue will be available for individual purchase, but everyone who subscribes early helps make this magazine more possible and better from the get-go. You can subscribe now, and order single issues once they come out, at the order page.
I’m looking for letters to the editor to make up the first issue’s letters section. I realize that without any previous letters or stories to respond to, obvious topics to write about are somewhat thin on the ground, but I hope the beginning of a new publication, as well as some of the interesting new manifestations of the long decline that have shown up around us lately, will provide enough material to go on. As I keep building this site and laying more groundwork for the magazine, I may also pose some questions here. Info on how to get in touch is at the contact page.
If you’d like to keep abreast of the latest, including questions for readers to weigh in on, progress, and the occasional sale, sign up for the New Maps email list, which will keep you updated whenever news is posted here or when a new issue is on its way. (I plan to keep the amount of email manageable: likely an email every one to three months.)
Thanks, and I look forward to creating a magazine you’ll love to read.

LINK: https://www.new-maps.com/news/2020/08/a-welcome-to-new-maps/

 

Smoke Hole Sessions

Author and master storyteller Martin Shaw brings us the Smoke Hole Sessions – a series of vital conversations with inspirational people, in the hope that in the crackle of the thinking, the fire of the language, the visioning and the wildness of the exchanges, we may find breadcrumbs that lead us out of the forest again, and into a deeper life. Inspired by his new book Smoke Hole, Martin speaks to some of today’s most admired writers, musicians, comedians, activists and more about their own work and what the last year has meant to them.

LINK: https://anchor.fm/smoke-hole-sessions

Dark Mountain: Issue 19

Our nineteenth book revolves around the theme of death, lament and regeneration.

With escalating reports of species extinction, the loss of habitats, and now a global pandemic, many people are waking up to the grief and loss that have threaded through the work Dark Mountain Project since it began. During a decade of descent, the books have appeared like small arks bobbing on a dark ocean, containers for creative work that mourns both ecological and cultural collapse and celebrates the beauty of a vanishing world.

LINK: https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-19/

Our core question we took with us as we began this voyage: How can we face and properly lament what has gone?

Shrouded, like a moth inside its cocoon, this collection sets out to hold ways to collectively mourn the loss not only of our fellow humans, but the wild world that has always succoured us. Our forebears knew the effect the dead have on life and the importance of grieving, of keeping the dead close. Our task was to find the words and images that mark the loss in ways we might have forgotten but still lie deep buried within us: how we might, like Caroline Ross, fashion our own Grave Goods out of deerskin and bronze, occupy the Houses of the Dead as in Fawzia Kane’s poems, and bear witness as Stephanie Krzywonos does, watching a penguin walk to its death in the arid Antarctic interior. How we can encounter the currents of the mythic beneath the ordinary world on a South Dakota highway as Samantha Wallen reminds us in The Death Mother.

The book has been created as a memorial by 60+ artists and writers, a gathering of testimonies from people and places, grief walkers and haunted lands. Ringed by the ashes of the burned forests of Australia and the Americas, entwined with the now-vanished tree roots of Deru Anding’s native Borneo, it enshrines the broken bones of dead creatures, reconfigured in ceremonial staffs by Jim Carter or intricately observed drawings by Kathryn Poole, the fallen feathers of the gyrfalcon, the wren and the black grouse, the testimonies of ancient grains and antediluvian fossils, wreathed by leaves of roseroot from Greenland and milkweed seeds from Ontario, the sharp scent of Mexican marigolds that light our way to the Underworld.

Words and images to take with us as companions into the dark…

Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs

Planet of the HumansPlanet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It’s too little, too late.

 

‘I want people to understand what really happened’: did the Son of Sam serial killer act alone?

Netflix’s The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness re-examines the infamous New York serial killer through the eyes of one man’s obsession with the case

For anybody who grew up in New York City, this is the case,’ said the series’ director, Joshua Zeman. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix
For anybody who grew up in New York City, this is the case,’ said the series’ director, Joshua Zeman. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

The Sons of Sam, a four-part series which jumps off from the panic of summer 1977, argues that Berkowitz probably did not act alone, based primarily on the work of the late investigator Maury Terry, whose zeal for solving the case spiraled from grounded skepticism to manic obsession over the course of several decades. Terry, who died at 69 in 2015, was initially skeptical of the NYPD’s explanation for the case, not least because the department was under enormous public pressure to capture the killer and lock up the investigation. Although Berkowitz eventually claimed, from prison for six consecutive life sentences, that he acted in concert with others as part of a satanic cult, the official narrative remained that Berkowitz was the sole culprit.

Link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/may/05/the-sons-of-sam-netflix-docuseries-serial-killer

DEATH AND TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY WITH SHELDON SOLOMON

Sheldon Solomon is one of the co-developers of Terror Management Theory, and a co-author of the book The Worm at the Core: On the role of Death in Life, in this episode we discuss mortality, death anxiety and the meaning of life in relation to death.

LINK: https://hermitix.podiant.co/e/death-and-terror-management-theory-with-sheldon-solomon-396f97ff6c8988/

Suzanne Simard Explores The The Forest Society Of Trees In Book

NPR’s Scott Simon talks with forestry scientist Suzanne Simard about her book, Finding the Mother Tree, and the real lives of trees.

LINK: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/01/992670191/suzanne-simard-explores-the-the-forest-society-of-trees-in-book

Book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54976983-finding-the-mother-tree