Why a hipster, vegan, green tech economy is not sustainable

Vijay Kolinjivadi

Al-Jazeera

Improving eco-efficiency within a capitalist growth-oriented system will not save the environment. 

On the western borderlands of Montreal's well-to-do Outremont district and the ultra-hipsterised and gentrified Mile End lies an expanse of land where the University of Montreal is currently building a new science campus. Just across is Parc-Extension, one of Canada's poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods and a port of call for many newly arrived immigrants.

The new campus has been touted as a model of "sustainable development". It boasts LEED-certified buildings to reduce environmental impact, rainwater collection structures, energy-efficient lighting and heat recycling, infrastructure for electric vehicles and bikes, lots of greenery, and overall, a minimal carbon footprint. A number of tech companies, including Microsoft's new AI Hub, are moving in and are expected to further enhance the "eco-efficiency" of the area.

The unspoken expectation is that once the green new campus is completed, capital and economic growth will naturally flow into the area. This means nearby neighbourhoods will get "revitalised", especially the poorer ones, like Parc-Extension.

Thus, immigrant-owned grocery stores, halal butcheries and community centres will soon be replaced by vegan chain restaurants, hip vintage clothing joints, organic food stores and coffee-shops galore, as landlords push out poor tenants to make space for more well-to-do ones. 

In the process, the implicit socio-economic violence behind gentrification will be invariably "greenwashed" and presented as development that would make the area more "sustainable", "beautiful" and "modern". 

Unfortunately, creation by destruction is what capitalism does best, and its damaging practices are anything but green. This market-driven "sustainable" vision of economic activity, ecological-conscious diets and "hipness" within modern capitalism reinforce inequality and still hurt the environment. 

Before I proceed further with my argument, I should mention that I am an academic, living in a "hip" part of Montreal and engage in activities that follow a particular aesthetic ethos, all of which make me very much a part of the reality I critique below. My aim is not to moralise, but rather to highlight the dangers of a political and economic system that profits from deceiving perhaps well-meaning self-proclaimed progressive folks into believing that a greener, more efficient capitalism is possible.

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Baseline of a Desecrated Land I: Food Supply

If Americans Knew

Part 1 of a 12 part series examining the ecological impacts of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

 

A synopsis of the findings is here.

 

by Dick Callahan, reposted from DickCallahan.net

 

How Israel’s water and agricultural technologies don’t even work for Israel

 

“California I hear has a big water problem. We in Israel don’t have a water problem. We use technology to solve it…” -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to California Governor Jerry Brown in March 2014.

“If you were planning to grow a new strain of tomato—don’t do it, because there is no water. Stop planting. Stop sowing new seedlings. There’s no water.”  -- Giora Shacham, Chairman of the Israeli Water Authority, to Jewish farmers at a December, 27, 2017 Israeli agriculture conference.

Introduction

A new mythology has it that Israel can save American agriculture and cities from drought. To accept this is to ignore the wilderness instructor’s maxim: “In a survival situation the first thing you need is recognition.” Our situation is that we in America have 324 million people and our country exports more food every year than any country in the history of the planet. Israel has eight and a half million people, exports almost no food, is entirely dependent on imported food, and every indicator is screaming that the Jewish state ecosystem is a dying patient on the gurney.

We will mostly bypass what suffering Israeli water colonization has caused Palestinians.  Instead, this piece looks at what fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly calls ‘Shifting Baselines,’ where some good thing is degraded over time and each successive generation adopts what is in front of them as their baseline reality. At some point an environment emerges that would terrify our ancestors. We Americans should look hard and honestly at Mother Earth groaning under Zionism in today’s Israel and ask, ‘Does America, or any country desiring a good future, want to follow that road?’

Before we start, it helps to know that Israel is 1,600 square miles smaller than the state of Vermont, the West Bank is smaller than St. Lawrence county in New York state, and the entire Gaza Strip is about the size of Bakersfield, California.

To evaluate Israeli land and water use technologies, these twelve recognitions might serve as jumping off points for discussion.

1) Israel cannot feed itself.
2) Israel pretends desalination impacts don’t exist.
3) Israel takes Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian water.
4) Israel’s one and only large, natural water body may be gone within twenty years.
5) Over half of the Jordan river valley’s biodiversity is already gone.
6) Israel and the Occupied Territories are awash in human sewage.
7) West Bank/Israeli streams and groundwater are over exploited and drying up so completely that centuries old trees in the nature reserves are dying of thirst.
8) Israel’s water, forestry, agricultural and military technologies have compromised agricultural land to the point where half of it is depleted and at risk, pesticide use is highest in the OECD, the land is absorbing more heat, and, in the long run, drip irrigation may do more harm than good.
9) Israel is the Flint, Michigan of the Middle East with a history of spectacular toxic spills, dumped military/industrial carcinogens, hundreds of contaminated wells, hundreds of millions of tons of contaminated ground water, millions of tons of oil stored right on the beach, massive unregulated hazardous waste sites built above aquifers, and the world’s oldest nuclear reactor, sitting 18 miles from the Syria-African fault line—with 1,537 documented defects in its aluminum core.
10) Wine, war, industrial tourism, and an unwinnable competition with the faster growing Arab population are the water marks on Israel’s self-portrait.
11) Israel is stuck with being the love-child of 1950’s American water engineers and 1800’s ‘make the desert bloom’ fundamentalism.
12) Israel is a cautionary tale.

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Resurgence Talks: Jeremy Leggett – The Solar Civilisation, Renaissance, and the New Despotism

Resurgence Talks: Jeremy Leggett – The Solar Civilisation, Renaissance, and the New Despotism  from The Resurgence Trust on Vimeo.

See also:Global civilisation to descend into ‘hell on earth’ unless we choose a new paradigm

One Community - 60 Second Summary

One Community

https://www.onecommunityglobal.org/ov... One Community is creating open source and free-shared resources and solutions for Highest Good food, energy, housing, education, for-profit and non-profit economics design, social architecture, fulfilled living, stewardship practices and more. The resources we are creating can be implemented as individual components or complete teacher/demonstration hubs, intentionally purposed to spin-off additional teacher/demonstration hubs as awareness and knowledge grow.

Rewilding: a rotten idea

Comment: SJW Environmentalism? Or just another symptom of Dark Green?

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Steve Brenner
Spiked

'Hey kids, let’s go and see the animals at the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve’, is not something any Dutch parent is likely to say to their children, these days. Last winter, they might have seen park rangers shooting thousands of skeletal animals, rotting animal carcasses, and a barren landscape dotted with dead trees. Rather than a place of natural harmony, the reserve now resembles the nightmarish visions of Hieronymus Bosch. A new report by Amsterdam’s provincial government has called for fundamental changes. A petition for the reserve’s closure has been signed by over 125,000 people. 

Events in the reserve this winter have attracted attention not only from concerned Dutch citizens, but also from around the world. The park has hitherto been held up as a model for rewilding – the planned introduction of plant and animal species, which are then left to develop independently of human influence. But events at Oostvaardersplassen have revealed that the misanthropic ideology that lies behind rewilding is fundamentally flawed. 

 The Oostvaardersplassen consists of 56 square kilometres of land reclaimed from the sea, a short drive away from Amsterdam. Originally intended as an industrial zone, it long laid undeveloped and abandoned. Under the influence of the Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, it was reinvented during the 1980s and 1990s, ostensibly as a safe haven for nature. Natural processes would be allowed to take their course and human intervention would be eliminated as much as possible. Human intervention, rewilding advocates argue, is arrogant and destructive to natural ends. As British ecologist George Monbiot argues, rewilding is the perfect antidote to ‘the Biblical doctrine of dominion’ – the destructive basis of the modern human relationship to nature. 

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Scientists Accidentally Develop 'Mutant' Enzyme That Eats Plastic

EcoWatch 

Researchers in the UK and the U.S. have inadvertently engineered an enzyme that eats up plastic. 

The enzyme is able to digest PET (polyethylene terephthalate)—the same material used in the ubiquitous plastic bottle that's clogging up landfills, coastlines and oceans around the world.

Amazingly, this discovery only happened by chance. Scientists from the University of Portsmouth in the UK and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) were examining the structure of a natural enzyme, Ideonella sakaiensis, found in 2016 at a Japanese waste recycling center. This enzyme could already break down PET plastic—it just doesn't do it very quickly.

To understand how Ideonella sakaiensis evolved, the research team "tweaked" the structure of the enzyme by adding some amino acids, according to John McGeehan, a Portsmouth professor who co-led the work. They ended up creating an enzyme that worked even faster than the natural one.

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Indonesian Borneo is finished: Pollution reaching epic proportions

RT

How destructive can man get, how ruthless, in his quest to secure maximum profit, even as he endangers the very survival of our planet? 

The tropical forests of Kalimantan (known as Borneo in Malaysia), the third largest island in the world, have almost totally disappeared. Coalmines are savagely scarring the hills; the rivers are polluted, and countless species are endangered or extinct.

It is all a terrible sight, whether you see it from the air or when driving (or walking) through the devastation that is taking place on the ground. The soil is black; it is often saturated with chemicals. Dead stubs of trees are accusatively pointing towards the sky. Many wonderful creatures, big and small, who used to proudly inhabit this tropical paradise, are now hiding in the depth of what remains of one of the largest tropical jungles on earth.

Engines are instantly roaring everywhere; huge equipment is continually cutting through something pure, or digging and finally transporting what has already been extracted, killed, or taken down mercilessly.

Ms. Mira Lubis, Senior Lecturer at Tanjungpura University, Pontianak in Western Kalimantan, summarizes the situation honestly but brutally:

“I think we, the people of Borneo, have lost our sovereignty over our own space and resources, under the pressure of global capitalism... Apparently, we just became poor despite all the wealth that we have.”

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Early warning signs that foretell imminent societal collapse – new study

inhabitat.com

A research paper published earlier this summer has scientists around the world in a frenzy, as it claims that archaeological information can be used to determine when a civilization is approaching collapse.

Researchers from the University of Maryland and University College London joined forces to examine 2,378 archaeological sites from nine regions of Neolithic Europe, a period that began approximately 9,000 years ago when the introduction of agricultural technologies spurred rapid population growth. The team collated evidence, backed up by known events in history, that signals when an ecosystem shifted into societal instability. In effect, the researchers believe that, in hindsight, they can spot the markers that signal the turning point for nearly every civilization during that time period.

Through their investigation of thousands of archaeological sites, the research team believes that they have identified consistent early warnings signs (EWSs) that mark the point when an ecosystem begins to experience a decline in resilience, which they refer to as a “regime shift.” From a scientific standpoint, it’s unlikely that any study has accomplished this in the past. “This study is the first to find early warning signals of demographic regime shift among human populations,” the authors wrote in the paper’s abstract. “The results suggest that archaeological information can potentially be used to monitor social and ecological vulnerability in human societies at large spatial and temporal scales.”

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Here's More Proof Earth Is in Its 6th Mass Extinction

Comment: Nothing like being prepared...

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Live Science

Diverse animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds.

Over the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114 times faster than they would have without human activity, said the researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to assess extinction rates. That means the number of species that went extinct in the past 100 years would have taken 11,400 years to go extinct under natural extinction rates, the researchers said.

Much of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification, the researchers said. [7 Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction] 

"Our activities are causing a massive loss of species that has no precedent in the history of humanity and few precedents in the history of life on Earth," said lead researcher Gerardo Ceballos, a professor of conservation ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at Stanford University.


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See also: Reality Change I: 16 Ignition Points

GMO Imports Causing Unapproved “Mystery GMO Plants” to Invade Ecosystems

Mike Barrett
Natural Society

Emerging as the world’s second largest importer of GMO crops, South Korea seems to be a big believer in feeding its citizens GMOs. Oddly enough, though, the country already has a government ban on their cultivation – likely as a means to protect its land from potential GMO dangers while still ‘benefiting’ from GMO foods. But despite an in-house ban and only accepting imports, GMO mystery plants have been taking root all over the country – providing hard evidence that GMO contamination is real and that even importing GMOs can disrupt a local ecosystem.

A National Institute of Ecology (NIE) monitoring report on the effects GMOs have on the natural environment showed GM corn and cotton discoveries across the country in 2013. Corn was found in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province; Gimje, North Jeolla Province; and Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province. Cotton was found in no fewer than fifteen locations.

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Destroying African agriculture with GMOs: U2's Bono partners with Monsanto

Jonathan Benson
Natural News

As his career continues to free fall into total irrelevance, pop star "Bono" of the rock group U2 has announced his support for a U.S.- backed plan to rape and pillage Africa by stealing its land and agricultural systems and replacing them with corporate-owned GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) and chemicals.

At the recent G8 Summit held at Camp David in Maryland, the Obama regime met with private industry leaders to announce the launch of the "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition," a thinly-veiled Green Revolution 2.0 that aims to uproot autonomous family farming systems throughout Africa and replace them with toxic monoculture systems controlled by multinational corporations like Monsanto.

The deceptively titled scheme, which investigative journalist Rady Ananda describes as "a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations, while destroying the ecosphere for profit," follows the usual script - all those poor African people need American corporations to take control of their lives so they can be healthy and prosperous.

It is a tired mantra that, upon closer look, is easily exposed as a complete sham to both exploit the vulnerable for obscene profits and seize control over the food supply. And this overtly evil agenda is one that Bono apparently believes is good, at least for the American interests that are slithering their way into Africa under the guise of helping the poor.

"They're future consumers for the United States," stated Bono during a 2012 interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, referring to the people of Africa who have yet to be assimilated into the beast system.

"The president is talking business. This is good. It's a whole new development paradigm today. The old donor/recipient relationship... it's over."

A video clip of Bono speaking these menacing words is available here:
KennySideshow.Blogspot.com. 

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Bowing to Monsanto, USDA Approves New GMO Soy and Cotton Crops

Common Dreams

‘This continues the disturbing trend of more herbicide-tolerant crop approvals taking place under President Obama’s watch.’ — Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water 

The United States Department of Agriculture on Thursday approved Monsanto's controversial herbicide-resistant genetically modified strains of soybean and cotton, in a move that critics say is a bow to the powerful biotechnology industry, at the expense of human and environmental health. 

The green-light is "simply the latest example of USDA’s allegiance to the biotechnology industry and dependence upon chemical solutions," Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter declared in a press statement. "This continues the disturbing trend of more herbicide-tolerant crop approvals taking place under President Obama’s watch."

Dr. Marcia Ishii-Eiteman of the Pesticide Action Network echoed Hauter's concerns, calling the new genetically modified crops "the latest in a slew of bad ideas" and a sign of the USDA's "allegiance to the largest pesticide corporations."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) on Thursday granted "nonregulated status for Monsanto Company’s (Monsanto) soybeans and cotton that are resistant to certain herbicides, including one known as dicamba." The biotechnology giant still awaits the Environmental Protection Agency's approval of the new herbicide, which contains both dicamba and glyphosate, designed to accompany the resistant strain.

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Wind2050: a dystopian society?

Comment: Wind farms are seriously bad news for a whole host of reasons. Yet they remain a tenacious icon within the green movement. I consider myself ecologically minded and passionate about Nature. Yet, seldom have I come across more fanatical and authoritarian followers than within climate change science and some environmental movements of today. They don't seem to realise that green ideology is just as open to green-washing and scientific distortion as anything else. 

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Wind Power Opponents in the Cross Hairs

  
 Press release 
February 28th 2014 
Wind2050: a dystopian society?

World Council for Nature 
Via www.windwahn.de/

The World Council for Nature (WCFN) has been informed that Danish taxpayers' money is being spent to the tune of 2,665,688 to spy on associations and citizens' groups of windfarm victims (present or potential). The name of the program is "Wind2050 Multidisciplinary study on local acceptance and development of wind power projects" (1). It is administered chiefly by the Danish multinational company Vestas, the Danish government, and Denmark's Aarlborg University. Its aim is to break the resistance of windfarm neighbors and opponents to Big Wind in Denmark and around the world. Note: in Denmark alone there are more than 200 associations of neighbors fighting the windfarm scourge, and Vestas' profits have taken a big plunge.

The anti-democratic nature of this surveillance and targeting of windfarm victims is disturbing. WCFN warns that the obsession of the Danish government with wind farms, anchored as elsewhere in the world in the financing needs of political parties (1), is driving it dangerously close to paternalistic totalitarianism.

Below is a map that the Wind2050 study has made of the web-links that connect most of the world's windfarm victim groups to each other. It is a form of saying: we have identified the enemy, here he is.  The CIA would proceed likewise with al Qaeda.

 

WCFN wishes to remind the public that the worst crimes against nature are or have been perpetrated by political regimes which are not balanced by effective counter-powers such as investigative media and an independent judicial system. In the former Soviet Union, the Sea of Aral was practically eraced from the map by the regime's obsession with cotton production. In very much the same way, the Golden Eagle, other raptors and extremely useful species of bats are being wiped out from countries like the UK and the US because of their governments' obsession with wind farms.

The much feared Orwellian society is dawning upon us, and "green shirts" are in the process of taking control of our lives, complete with "smart meters", "smart grids" and imbecilic directives, with the help of self-serving politicians and pharaonic subsidies that corrupt anything they touch.

"Orwellian" is an adjective describing "the societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It connotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth" (Wikipedia).

Indeed, the denial of any of the ill-effects of wind turbines is particularly obvious in today’s society: denial of the harm done to residents, and to biodiversity, landscapes, tourism, property values, the economy, sovereign debt and the price of electricity. Paid propagandists troll the Internet with a mission: to drown wind farm opponents under a deluge of half-truths so as to whitewash their industry which is essentially non-performing, extremely costly and harmful to people and the environment.

Are political correctness, corruption, and wind farms leading us to a dystopian society?

Mark Duchamp
Chairman
+34 693 643 736
wcfn@live.com

Source: 
 
press release from Windwahn:
http://www.windwahn.de/

References:

(1) – Wind250 program: http://bit.ly/1fO8eDX
(2) – financing of political parties through wind farms http://wcfn.org/2014/02/10/not-renewable/

Spirals and Circles: The Art of Stu Jenks

endicott-studio.com

“The Circle. The Spiral. Universal symbols from all cultures, representing everything from festive pinwheels to the internal journey of the soul. The Spiral: A movement down into despair, a motion up into joy, a sojourn inward and back out again. The Circle: A path of completion, a new beginning, a continuing sense of union. For the past number of years I have been exploring in my photography these two symbols, creating them in sand, in flame, in water, in time. Each time I learn a little more about the space I’m in, both emotionally internal to my experiences, and physically external to my environment. This series is as much about the exploration of my spiritual reality, as it is about an appreciation of form, shape, and design.”

-- Stu Jenks

 

 

 

Collecting rainwater now illegal in many states as Big Government claims ownership over our water

Natural News

Many of the freedoms we enjoy here in the U.S. are quickly eroding as the nation transforms from the land of the free into the land of the enslaved, but what I'm about to share with you takes the assault on our freedoms to a whole new level. You may not be aware of this, but many Western states, including Utah, Washington and Colorado, have long outlawed individuals from collecting rainwater on their own properties because, according to officials, that rain belongs to someone else.

As bizarre as it sounds, laws restricting property owners from "diverting" water that falls on their own homes and land have been on the books for quite some time in many Western states. Only recently, as droughts and renewed interest in water conservation methods have become more common, have individuals and business owners started butting heads with law enforcement over the practice of collecting rainwater for personal use.

Check out this YouTube video of a news report out of Salt Lake City, Utah, about the issue. It's illegal in Utah to divert rainwater without a valid water right, and Mark Miller of Mark Miller Toyota, found this out the hard way.

After constructing a large rainwater collection system at his new dealership to use for washing new cars, Miller found out that the project was actually an "unlawful diversion of rainwater." Even though it makes logical conservation sense to collect rainwater for this type of use since rain is scarce in Utah, it's still considered a violation of water rights which apparently belong exclusively to Utah's various government bodies.

"Utah's the second driest state in the nation. Our laws probably ought to catch up with that," explained Miller in response to the state's ridiculous rainwater collection ban.

Salt Lake City officials worked out a compromise with Miller and are now permitting him to use "their" rainwater, but the fact that individuals like Miller don't actually own the rainwater that falls on their property is a true indicator of what little freedom we actually have here in the U.S. (Access to the rainwater that falls on your own property seems to be a basic right, wouldn't you agree?)

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Sustainable farming takes root in agriculture

May 16, 2011, 

San Francisco Chronicle

The sustainable farming movement, cradled in Northern California, has gone mainstream, challenging the industrial model that has ruled American farming for more than half a century. Eight big foundations - the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation - have just banded together in a group, called AGree, to examine food systems and mediate the conflict between conventional and alternative farming.  

An emerging scientific consensus that alternative farm systems work, and that the environmental and health costs of industrial agriculture are too high, has drawn powerful new interests to what was a parochial arena controlled by commodity groups. These costs in the United States include depletion of soil fertility and aquifers, from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to the Ogallala aquifer in the High Plains. They also include giant algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico from fertilizer runoff in the Mississippi River, antibiotic resistance from heavy use of antibiotics in livestock, pollinator loss from pesticides and large-scale, single-crop farming, and water pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations.