“Instrumental reason is at the core of the emerging bio-tech paradigm, which is rapidly increasing the social, ecological, and spiritual degradation produced by civilization as a model of dominance. To counter this apocalyptic scenario based on the domination of nature, I propose poetic reason as the foundational matrix to move away from the instrumentalization of life in order to reshape in a more harmonious way the coexistence of human beings with each other, the environment, the cosmological order, and the animal realm.”
Category: Mayhem
‘The buildings were a sign of civic pride’: anger as art colleges around the UK close their doors
Colleges that once fostered talent – often from working-class backgrounds – have vanished at an alarming rate. Two beneficiaries of that system are documenting its demise
LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/sep/17/the-buildings-were-a-sign-of-civic-pride-anger-as-art-colleges-around-the-uk-close-their-doors
Earth is outside its ‘safe operating space for humanity’ on most key measurements, study says
Earth is exceeding its “safe operating space for humanity” in six of nine key measurements of its health, and two of the remaining three are headed in the wrong direction, a new study said.
Antarctica warming much faster than models predicted in ‘deeply concerning’ sign for sea levels
Study finds ‘direct evidence’ of polar amplification on continent as scientists warn of implications of ice loss
Antarctica is likely warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the world and faster than climate change models are predicting, with potentially far-reaching implications for global sea level rise, according to a scientific study.
Why the Coral Reef Crisis in Florida Is a Problem for All of Us
A marine heat wave is warming the waters off the coast of Florida, pushing temperature readings as high as 101 Fahrenheit and endangering a critical part of sea life: the coral reef.
Catrin Einhorn, who covers biodiversity, climate and the environment for The Times, discusses the urgent quest to save coral and what it might mean for the world if it disappears.
The summer from hell was just a warning
It’s been a summer of norm-shattering extremes — with temperatures beyond human memory, catastrophic floods from Beijing to Vermont, choking wildfires and climate records tumbling on every continent.
Welcome to the rest of our lives.
LINK: https://www.inkl.com/news/the-summer-from-hell-was-just-a-warning/MalJNgHRPXn
The next pandemic could strike crops, not people
Genetic uniformity is central to modern farming. It leaves us vulnerable to plant disease breakouts.
LINK: https://grist.org/agriculture/next-pandemic-will-be-plants-not-people/
‘Off-the-charts records’: has humanity finally broken the climate?
Extreme weather is ‘smacking us in the face’ with worse to come, but a ‘tiny window’ of hope remains, say leading climate scientists
Major ‘Population Correction’ Coming For Humanity, Scientist Predicts
© Provided by ScienceAlert
A little over two centuries ago, in the year 1800, roughly a billion people called Earth home.
Just a century later, it had grown by another 600 million.
Today, there are around 8 billion people on the planet.
That sort of growth is unsustainable for our ecosphere, risking a ‘population correction’ that according to a new study could occur before the century is out.
The prediction is the work of population ecologist William Rees from the University of British Columbia in Canada. He argues that we’re using up Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate, and that our natural tendencies as humans make it difficult for us to correct this “advanced ecological overshoot”.
The result could be some kind of civilizational collapse that ‘corrects’ the world’s population, Rees says – one that could happen before the end of the century in a worst case scenario. Only the richest and most resilient societies would be left.
“Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources,” Rees writes in his published paper.
Critics of ‘degrowth’ economics say it’s unworkable – but from an ecologist’s perspective, it’s inevitable
You may not have noticed, but earlier this month we passed Earth overshoot day, when humanity’s demands for ecological resources and services exceeded what our planet can regenerate annually.
Many economists criticising the developing degrowth movement fail to appreciate this critical point of Earth’s biophysical limits.
Ecologists on the other hand see the human economy as a subset of the biosphere. Their perspective highlights the urgency with which we need to reduce our demands on the biosphere to avoid a disastrous ecological collapse, with consequences for us and all other species.