Tag: forest

Humans Have Broken One of The Natural Power Laws Governing Earth’s Oceans

TESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS12 NOVEMBER 2021
Just as with planetary or molecular systems, mathematical laws can be found that accurately describe and allow for predictions in chaotically dynamic ecosystems too – at least, if we zoom out enough.

But as humans are now having such a destructive impact on the life we share our planet with, we’re throwing even these once natural universalities into disarray.

“Humans have impacted the ocean in a more dramatic fashion than merely capturing fish,” explained marine ecologist Ryan Heneghan from the Queensland University of Technology.

“It seems that we have broken the size spectrum – one of the largest power law distributions known in nature.”

The power law can be used to describe many things in biology, from patterns of cascading neural activity to the foraging journeys of various species. It’s when two quantities, whatever their initial starting point be, change in proportion relative to each other.

In the case of a particular type of power law, first described in a paper led by Raymond W. Sheldon in 1972 and now known as the ‘Sheldon spectrum’, the two quantities are the body size of an organism, scaled in proportion to its abundance. So, the larger they get, there tend to be consistently fewer individuals within a set species size group.

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‘XEN: THE ZEN OF THE OTHER’ REFLECTS ON EASTERN MYSTICISM, WEST COAST WILDERNESS,AND KEROUACIAN ISOLATION

Xen - The Zen of the Other

I enjoyed reading Xen: The Zen of the Other, but the audio radio play is even better. Its gusto voice acting, hypnotic musicscapes, and mystical plot all add up to a transporting experience that’s beyond what we normally expect from a book recording.

Get the Xen: The Zen of the Other audiobook radio play at the Digital Panic Machine Bandcamp page.

Read the entire review here. 

From A to Zerzan

[Note: JZ is too timid for our taste but I guess he can serve as a gateway for people completely out of the loop on AnPrim thinking]

Eugene is home to notable anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan, who’s recently released a collection of essays about civilization

Zerzan is famous as one of the major developers of the anarcho-primitivism worldview and in 2014 spoke out against a group that tried to inject transphobia into the theory. Put simply, anarcho-primitivism is anti-technology and calls for the abolition of the large-scale industrialization that has distanced humans from our nature. It’s an ideology that was thrown into the mainstream by Ted Kaczynski (also known as the Unabomber), with whom Zerzan had shared anticivilization ideas during his high-profile trial and while in prison.

“I think there’s only one civilization left, and this is it, and it’s failing,” Zerzan says. “Maybe we look at certain things anew in that light.”

With the urgency of climate change, Zerzan says civilization needs to reconsider itself and the technologies it relies on because time is running out. “If we plod along as business as usual, it’s a course of suicide,” he says.

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

Beware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth

James Lovelock

Covid-19 may well have been one attempt by the Earth to protect itself. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier

Beware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth
‘I am not hopeful of a positive outcome at Cop26, knowing who is participating. I was not invited to Glasgow, though that is hardly a surprise.’ Photograph: Magdalena Bujak/Alamy

I don’t know if it is too late for humanity to avert a climate catastrophe, but I am sure there is no chance if we continue to treat global heating and the destruction of nature as separate problems.

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THE BASILISK by Paul Kingsnorth

MY DEAR BRIDGET,

I would not normally write to you in this way. I would not normally write to anyone in this way. I gave up writing letters some years ago after my correspondents mostly stopped replying. When one of my friends sent me a two-line text message in response to a five-page, handwritten letter—to add insult to injury, it even had one of those smiley face things at the end—I knew the game was up. I am not convinced that people know how to write letters anymore, or even to read them. I won’t bore you with the facts about the ongoing measurable decline in our ability to concentrate. You of all people know what the screens are doing to our minds.

That, as you might already have guessed, is the subject of this letter.

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Xen – The Zen of the Other the Audio Drama

Xen - The Zen of the Other

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC, and more.

This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
Buy Digital Album $6.66 USD or more

Xen: The Zen of the Other is a work that follows one man as he attempts to find his way through the jumble of modernity that envelopes us all and threatens to strangle us in its “Tentacles Longer Than Night.”

Cast into a world where the liminal overlaps with the world of paranormal /philosophical speculations, Ezra Buckley struggles to keep his head above water long enough to pluck a jewel of wisdom from the crown of a forest spirit.

In a world devoid of rites of passage, Ezra finds himself on his own as he is confronted with the very real prospect of having a life-changing, Liminal experience in the woods of Big Sur, if he can survive it.

Is it even real?

Is it the legendary Watchers of Big Sur phenomena or something else?

Xen is a work that confronts the questions of identity, modernity, life, the other, and the place for rites of passage in the modern world.
This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
credits
released October 29, 2021

Xen: The Zen of the Other

Written by Ezra Buckley. You’ll have to decide for yourself if that’s a real name or not.- thepsychopath.org
Background information by Cameron Whiteside, if that indeed is his real name.- whereiscameron.wtf
Produced by P. Emerson Williams- pemersonwilliams.wordpress.com
The voice of Joseph Matheny performed by himself- josephmatheny.com
The voice of Ezra Buckley performed by Chris Gabriel aka memeanalysis- memeanalysis.com
The voice of Ralph performed by P. Emerson Williams
The voice of Tiamat performed by Anna “Maiya” Young- www.godmonsters.com
The voice of Racoon 1 performed by Iskandar Sakut abn Mayu (aka Eian Orange of Z(enseider)Z)- eianorange.zenseiderz.org
The voice of Racoon 2 by performed Deb Petrochko – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(mythology)
The voice of the waitperson performed Missy G – afieldofred.wordpress.com
The poems of Ezra Buckley read by Joseph Matheny

Xen: The Zen of the Other- Copyright 2021 Joseph Matheny
All Rights Reserved

Influencer Society and Its Future

Influencer Society and Its Future

Swallow the Ted pill on Unabomber stan TikTok

“HELLO FELLOW TRIBE MEMBERS.” The friendly greeting is superimposed over a familiar image of a rust-colored A-frame cabin with a green roof. Below it, a teen waves and strikes poses along with the on-screen text while percussion music plays in the video’s background. “Some of my beliefs: unga bunga > ooga booga. the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. anti civ CHAD. i cannot wait to tear down some power lines with you guys!”

Of all the contemporary internet’s innumerable hovels, few are as bewildering as the shambly shanty of Tedpilled TikTok. There, content creators meet the platform’s trending memes in a densely ironic effort to elevate Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Through song imitations, dialogue reenactments, reaction videos, voiceovers, and dances, TikTokers broadcast the incarcerated terrorist’s views about the necessity of dismantling industrial society through property destruction and murder.

Using the hashtags #tedpill, #tedk, and #tedkazcynski—which have collectively garnered millions of views—the Tedpilled place photographs of the Unabomber in “duets” with other videos, creating a counterpoint between Kaczynski’s views and the supposed excesses of influencer culture. With the Wombo.AI, they face-morph Kaczynski into goofily singing songs about Fortnite. Elsewhere, shaggy anarchists riff on the #DontBeSurprised trend—in which TikTokers share images representing their hopes and dreams with the text “Don’t be surprised if one day I just . . . ”—juxtaposing the peppy indie-folk song “Go Down On You” by The Memories with pictures of Ted Kaczynski standing next to his off-the-grid cabin. Light-hearted jokes about personal body counts and depopulation fantasies coexist alongside more earnest defenses of anarcho-primitivist politics.

To swallow the “Ted pill” is to embrace the romance of a return to a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

It’s a strange, if organic, world. It blurs the line between the hyperbolic adoration of online stan culture and a critique of the same, all unfolding in the vernacular of the young and extremely online: Ted was right. Ted is daddy. Ted is a based God. In one since-deleted video, a mop-topped kid mouths along to a hip-hop song and points to a text bubble reading, “the Industrial Revolution lowkey be cringe,” followed by a string of emojis. Another entry in the canon is labeled “ted is so fine i’m sorry”; in it, a doe-eyed teen who has superimposed herself over a photo of a young, fresh-faced Unabomber sits in front of the stars-and-stripes while lip-syncing the Counting Crows “Accidentally in Love” (originally composed for the motion picture Shrek 2).

To swallow the “Ted pill” is to embrace the romance of a return to a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It is to reject modernity, agriculture, and civilization itself. It offers a dystopian diagnosis of modern life, embracing a utopian fantasy of some prelapsarian state-of-nature. More paradoxically, Ted-pilling means using TikTok—a culturally dominant, globalized, Chinese-owned social networking techno-bauble—as a means of agitating for a radical political philosophy that is, among much else, vehemently anti-technology.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

As climate pledges fall short, U.N. predicts globe could warm by catastrophic 2.7 degrees Celsius

New Glasgow commitments, if implemented, would result in a 12 percent emissions cut by the decade’s end, well short of what is needed to curb global warming

As climate pledges fall short, U.N. predicts globe could warm by catastrophic 2.7 degrees Celsius
Exhaust rises from smoke stacks and cooling towers at the Sinopec Zhenhai Refining & Chemical Co. processing facility on the outskirts of Ningbo, China. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)

LONDON — The United Nations warned Friday that based on current action plans submitted by 191 countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is on track to warm by more than 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

The findings come as President Biden gathered the world’s biggest emitters to the White House Friday to try reach an agreement among some of them to cut methane — a potent greenhouse gas — 30 percent by 2030.

The U.N. report offered good and bad news as it synthesized the latest projected emissions by individual countries, as forecast in their “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDC) reports.

So far, 113 parties to the U.N. climate accord, including the European Union’s collective of 27 countries, have submitted 86 new, updated and often more ambitious projections. Together these nations account for about half of total emissions. If they carry out their current plans, they are on track to produce a 12 percent reduction in heat-trapping gases in 2030 compared to 2010.

That’s the good news, said, Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of U.N. Climate Change, in a news conference Friday marking the release of the report.

But taken as a whole, the 191 nations that are parties to the U.N. climate accord would contribute a 16 percent increase in greenhouse gases in 2030 than 2010.

Espinosa called these numbers “sobering.”

“It is not enough, what we have on the table,” she said during the news conference.

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Shed A Light: Rupert Read – This civilization is finished: so what is to be done?

Rupert Read, Environmental Philosopher and Chair of Green House Think Tank.

The Paris Agreement explicitly commits us to use non-existent, utterly reckless, unaffordable and ineffective ‘Negative Emissions Technologies’ which will almost certainly fail to be realised. Barring a multifaceted miracle, within a generation, we will be facing an exponentially rising tide of climate disasters that will bring this civilization down. We, therefore, need to engage with climate realism. This means an epic struggle to mitigate and adapt, an epic struggle to take on the climate-criminals and, notably, to start planning seriously for civilizational collapse.

Dr Rupert Read is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Rupert is a specialist in Wittgenstein, environmental philosophy, critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, and philosophy of film. His research in environmental ethics and economics has included publications on problems of ‘natural capital’ valuations of nature, as well as pioneering work on the Precautionary Principle. Recently, his work was cited by the Supreme Court of the Philippines in their landmark decision to ban the cultivation of GM aubergine. Rupert is also chair of the UK-based post-growth think tank, Green House, and is a former Green Party of England & Wales councillor, spokesperson, European parliamentary candidate and national parliamentary candidate. He stood as the Green Party MP-candidate for Cambridge in 2015.

About the series
Shed A Light is a series of talks that seek to present alternative framings of future human-nature interactions and the pragmatic solution pathways that we could take to get there.

By recognising the interlinkages between struggles for ecological, social and economic justice in addition to the desperate need for immediate societal transformation, Shed A Light aims to engage everyone with the green agenda and prompt broad-based discussions on sustainability issues.

Filmed at Churchill College, 7 November 2018.