Wilderness Letter | The Wilderness Society
Rated • 0 reviews • environment • wilderness.org
- Stumble >
-
b-bear/environment
Last seen: 6 months ago
b-bear is a 29 year old guy from Mountain Air, VIC, Australia
Drink your Bliss; for every Thing that Lives is Holy.
~William Blake
-
Mon auberge était à la Grande Ourse.
My inn was under the sign of the Great Bear. ~Rimbaud
-
-
-
-
Video: Coolio and Terry Christian star in students...
Rated • 0 reviews • environment, bears, ardashir • guardian.co.uk
-
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Snared in a homemade NitroNet
Rated • 2 reviews • environment • bbc.co.uk
Let's get dirty.
-
Welcome to Guilty Planet : Guilty Planet
Rated • 1 review • environment, parasites, science, blogs, arts • scienceblogs.com
"We are all parasites," a friend recently remarked as our train moved past the graffiti covered walls of Berlin. "Anyone who does not understand this--or thinks that somehow the good that they do in this world outweighs the bad--is delusional."
A fascinatingly cynical blog, Guilty Planet, maintained by PhD student Jennifer Jacquet, who works for the fishery industry. I found this on Imorgen's spectacular site.
-
Protestand Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism
Rated • 3 reviews • environment, sociology, theory, capitalism • ne.jp
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.
In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." [The Saints' Everlasting Rest, 1652] But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. To-day the spirit of religious asceticism --whether finally, who knows? --has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning,
tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."
-Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905
-
Eartheasy Blog & Peak Phosphorus
Reviewed • 4 reviews • ecology, environment, science, love, knowledge • eartheasy.com
- A Phosphorescent Growl
Like oil or coal, phosphorus is a nonrenewable resource. As we speak, mining is being done in the name of your desires. This mining is threatening to deplete the reserves of one of the most important basic building blocks of life.
Learn about phosphorus before it becomes extinct. Phosphorus is mined for industries, for agriculture and even for war. We force it into dishwashers, into chemical fertilizers and into bombs.
Without phosphorus, plants, bones and life as we know it would not exist. The catastrophic consequences of the loss of phosphorus is little talked about, but the fact of its depletion necessitates a complete revolution of agriculture and industry.
It seems almost impossible for most people to accept the urgent necessity of complete transformation of agriculture and of the way in which we create products to meet our needs. Many people would prefer to dream of a future in which spacecrafts mine other planets in order to feed our current irrational wants.
But this is not the future that is based on a survival of love. This is a future of knowledge without love. The prophets, WIlliam Blake, Jesus and the apostle Paul, and Buddhists are all right: without love knowledge is useless.
The environmental debate is dominated by oblivious lifestyle politicians who, stuck in their cities, plugging their polemics and behaving like police, fail to seriously discuss the key issue of agriculture. For too long, however, we have been listening to people who do not love the earth and every thing that lives.
Centuries ago, peasants and even urban-dwellers understood that they needed to use their excrement to replenish their soil - they did what worked, and justified what they did through local traditions. Little did they know that they were restocking their supplies of phosphorus in spreading shit and urine, animal or human, over the soil. It was not until an alchemist in Hamburg in 1666 isolated the element phosphorus (by burning the urine of soldiers) that the world gained a new kind of knowledge.
A phosphorescent knowledge emerged in the era of Enlightenment that the alchemists began to illuminate. Burning with a desire to change the world, this age of knowledge, quite against its own wishes, somehow put us on track to burning up our own earth and the ground beneath us.
The mining of phosphorus emerged as the solution to feed the masses. Agriculture would remain agrarian, and would be scientifically re-organized while also opened up to profit-driven factors in order to maximize yield. And the urban would remain urban: agriculture pumped up with phosphorus would allow the emergence of clean, excrement-free spaces and cities in which the middle classes and the politely-hating classes in cities could flourish, hanging out their whites to dry over fertilized lawns. Here was a neat chemical but deadly solution to a problem that needed a much more local solution.
The fact that all the growth of a politely hating culture is non-renewable is the biggest irony of our age and of our millennium. Now, as we wee out the phosphorus that leaks out of our bones, we middle-class first-worlders need to return to the very filthy matters that our ancestors had chased out of our cities.
Meanwhile, a real look at industrialized agriculture and its woes must begin. Without transformation the future is dark. For we are only now beginning to realise that industrialized and quarantined agriculture is an inefficient menace to the earth, to plants, to animals and to our selves. Unless we transform the way in which food is produced, and the fundamentals of how we live alongside the earth, then nothing is possible beyond the polemics of urban dwellers burning phosphorus as doom comes our way.
-
The flourishing commons: disembodied conversation | Whole...
Rated • 0 reviews • environment • findarticles.com
-
Worldwatch Institute | Vision for a Sustainable World
Rated • 21 reviews • environment • worldwatch.org
