Posts tagged "environment":

Journal

I've booked a ticket to Istanbul for August 1. I want to get away for August, and wasn't sure whether to go east or west. But, from a journey I made almost forty years ago, I know that I like the city, and it serves as a hub, so I will decide what to do when I'm there; either spend a couple of weeks and come home, or, indeed to extend my journey. If D decides she wants to join me, it will probably be to Europe; otherwise I may decide to go to India.

Spent an hour trying to get an old Rapoo bluetooth keyboard working properly in Linux. It disconnected every few seconds, and I was thinking I'd need to buy a new keyboard. But the problem seems to have been solved or mitigated after uncommenting a couple of lines in the bluetooth configuration files.

Demonstrations against the judicial reform shook the country and scores of people were arrested for blocking city streets, highways and the airport. As for me, I was at home, pottering around the house and playing with a new pen that just arrived from China.

The afternoon walks around here are pretty boring actually; maybe even in the best of seasons. A monoculture of pine woods, and fields. But when I go with a camera, I begin to see things that I wouldn't normally notice. That seems to be the beauty of photography - to help us to train the eye to see what's out there, and to find new ways of looking at it. I'm having a lot of fun with this.

Not many wild flowers to look at in this season, other than these globe thistles.

More in the photoblog gallery.

Journal

Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I'm getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.

Problems lingered this morning after uninstalling Protonvpn, which proved too buggy on my Linux box. After the uninstall I couldn't enter some sites (including this one). This was resolved by restarting the modem. I may have to return to the earlier vpn (which worked fine).

Our resident climatologist Avner Gross has a good article about climate change in the Hebrew version of Haaretz that didn't make it into English, so I read it today. Together with Greta's book, through which I'm still plodding, I feel a bit under the weather.

It's almost impossible to depart this country, at least to Europe, without airplanes, so I think I have hit on a unique plan: Go to the airport and book the first plane with an empty seat. Planes are rarely full, especially out of season. Once in Europe, it is possible to go by trains or buses, which are less harmful to the biosphere.

That won't help with India. The days of overland travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have passed. With an Israeli resident stamp, Iran could arrest me as a spy, while India is wary of travelers who have been to Pakistan. I'm not even sure that foreigners can travel through the Wagah border these days.

Practice day / book launch, a film

This morning I took part in a practice day / book launch for the translation of Zen and the Art of Climate Change (the same theme as the book launch that I previously described in Tel Aviv. Here there was maybe a greater effort to describe the common ground between the spiritual approach and the phenomenon of climate change, which Avner Gross managed to describe very well. the event was much smaller (about 40 people) so there was a chance for the audience to express themselves - their remarks were interesting.

In the evening I watched the film The Banshees of Inisherin. I wasn't expecting to like it, so I wasn't disappointed. The story seemed weak and phony, as well as being full of overused stereotypes about Irish people and island people. The locations themselves are amazingly beautiful. I recognised some of them from a couple of stays on Inishmor, and it seems that others were filmed on Achill Island in County Mayo - which I haven't seen.

Journal

I'm still suffering from my by cold. We had a couple of guests over the weekend. C H, a Canadian citizen, who is associated with the Thich Nhat Hanh sanghas - a former "boat person" who escaped from Vietnam just after the war. She is a member of a Buddhist practice centre in Ontario, and on her way back to Canada, was about to visit another practice centre in Italy.

Our other visitors were G with his son. G is an Italian married to a Parsi woman from Bombay. They met years ago when on a bus to volunteer at the Freedom Theatre of the late Juliano Mir Khamees, in Jenin. G has been participating in a Feldenkreis course for the last four years, because he finds the therapy helpful for their son, who suffers from CP. They have been living partly in India and partly in Hongkong, but will be moving to the UK in the summer, as his wife has accepted an academic position there. When he was visiting the UK with his son, to find out about schools, he was amazed by the rough treatment they received at the airport - basically they were shut in a room and interrogated. That was because he had made the mistake of not purchasing onward tickets. A warm welcome to post-Brexit Britain.

The situation has been a bit tense in the Palestinian village Hares that we often visit, after a young person from the village went on a rampage in the settlement of Ariel and killed three Israelis, before eventually being shot dead by the army. One immediate result was that other members of the village were denied entry permits to their jobs at the nearby large Israeli industrial park there - where the culprit, Muhammad Souf, had been working. Our friend in Hares, Issa, happens to be a distant relative, with the same family name - and he also has a son called Muhammad. Issa is in a wheel chair for the last 20 years after being shot by an Israeli soldier's bullet on his doorstep, during the second intifada. He is paralyzed from the waste down. But he was and has continued to be a peace activist. Like-minded Israelis are always welcome in his home and C.H., the Canadian Buddhist mentioned above, had just a few days prior to the current events, facilitated a day of mindfulness for Israelis and Palestinians there.

Hares is for the most part a peaceful village, but no one should be surprised that the desperation felt by the vast majority of Palestinians under military occupation results in occasional desperate acts of violence. In many cases it is simply an "honourable" way to commit suicide - though at terrible cost because the perpetrator knows that punishment will be visited on his entire family; all his loved ones, who in many cases have no idea of his intentions. As of Wednesday, the army was preparing to demolish the family home.

The way in which the violence of the occupation poisons the futures of Palestinian young people can be understood from the video Arna's Children, a heartbreaking feature-length movie that can be watched on YouTube (I could not get it to load in Invidious). The movie was made by Juliano, mentioned above, about the work of his mother, a Jewish Israeli married to a Palestinian, with young people in Jenin. Juliano himself was assassinated some time afterwards by an unknown assailant.

Culpability

There are a couple at climate sites where one can take a quiz to calculate the quantity of CO2 each of us produce. According to the parameters of the test, it turns that I'm pretty much a climate criminal. My wife and I share a free standing house of about 150 square meters and travel everywhere by car or by plane. That's enough, apparently, to tilt the scale towards 11 - 13 tons of CO2 per person, regardless of diet or other factors.

I can add that all my electricity is produced by fossil fuels and a third of the water is desalinated by means of electricity.

If these crimes were not enough, I live in an apartheid state where the majority of the land was stolen from an indigenous people whose descendents continue to be oppressed today; a state that makes a living by exporting weapons and cyber-weapons and whose principal friends are corrupt dictators and war-criminals.

Being human, according to many parameters, is already to belong to a species that acts like a cancer on the earth; invading the territories of other species, de-foresting habitats, polluting the rivers, poisoning the oceans, wrecking the atmosphere and bringing about the extinction of many other life forms.

Our presence is as harmful to our environment as that of the rabbits introduced to Australia, which quickly overran the entire continent and ate up most of the vegetation. Or the European settlers in the Americas, who supplanted the indigenous population.

If we were to be put on trial for our crimes, we could claim innocence. We could claim that we ourselves are victims. We could claim extenuating circumstances and express contrition. But if we pardon ourselves and then repeat the crimes, what should be our punishment?

In the case of those rabbits, the favored solution was control or eradication:

Various methods in the 20th century have been attempted to control the Australian rabbit population. Conventional methods include shooting rabbits and destroying their warrens, but these had only limited success. From 1901 to 1907, a rabbit-proof fence was built in Western Australia in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the rabbits.[2][3] The myxoma virus, which causes myxomatosis, was introduced into the rabbit population in the 1950s and had the effect of severely reducing the rabbit population. (Wikipedia)

In the case of settlers (White Americans? Israeli Jews?), they could be expelled, like the Indians of Idi Amin's Uganda. But since humans are anyway problematic, maybe they should simply be exterminated, like the rabbits?

There has to be another solution. Extreme retribution is exacted only at the cost of losing our humanity. Murder, capital punishment, genocide, even suicide are all crimes against humanity.

Does humanity actually count for anything when humans themselves are the problem?

I would argue that what we actually mean when we talk about humanity is divinity. And divinity, rather than being a quirky religious term, means the essential existence-consciousness underlying everything manifest. We call it humanity, because to be human is to be what we are. For a rabbit, it would be his "rabbitness". And the essential in us, as in the rabbit, is the consciousness that binds us all together. The what-we-are is the divine.

I am the gambling of the cheats and the splendor of the splendid. I am the victory of the victorious, the resolve of the resolute, and the virtue of the virtuous.

-Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita 10.36

So essentially, even when we are effectively undermining nature by cause of our existence, we are remaining true to our nature. Because we are part of all nature. We are the thing that we are undermining. We "inter-are", as Thich Nhat Hanh would say. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation.

This is not to say that we cannot mitigate the damage, offset the environmental costs, or possibly give back to the universe something in return for its generous gifts.

Even by being aware of our connectedness, our behaviour can begin to change. It may dawn on us that birdsong and snow on the mountain peaks are as essential to our existence as the shiny new phone that we lust for, or the new car. We can reevaluate our priorities and begin to make different decisions. The question is whether the changes we make - individual and collective - will be sufficient, and in time.

Kfar Hittim

Went up to the Sea of Galilee with the family, staying in Kfar Hittim, in the large house of an Israeli-Indian couple who seem to spend most of their time in India. We were 12; 8 adults and four kids. Kfar Hittim is near the place where Salah ad-Din's forces won a decisive battle against the crusadors towards the end of the 12th century. It's said that they won by cutting the crusadors off from the lake and then starting a wildfire where they were encamped. The battle decimated the crusador forces. Afterwards, more than 200 knights were beheaded, and the ordinary soldiers were enslaved. The king and some of the barons were shown mercy.

In 1948 the Palestinians were forced out of the area; the village of Hittin and others were evacuated or destroyed.

An earlier battle was fought in the time of Herod against rebels that were holding out in difficult to access caves in the cliffs of Arbel. They were defeated when Herod's forces sent down soldiers in chests, who set fires at the cave entrances and smoked out the rebel fighters and their families.

The same caves must have been an ideal domicile for the paleolithic people who earlier inhabited them, in an area then teeming with wildlife.

The whole area is geologically extreme, a landscape formed by extinct volcanos and earthquakes, the sheer cliffs plunging almost 400 meters - and the lake itself well below sea level. It's a small part of the Syrian-African rift - a feature that goes all the way down to Africa's great lake system. A great tear in the earth's crust, which till today is disturbed by constant tremors, though most of them are too faint to feel. We looked down over the valley from the edge of one of the two "Horns" of Hittim, as these high cliffs at Arbel were known.

Optimism vs pessimism vis à vis the climate emergency

In his recent interviews, Kim Stanley Robinson has been saying that the 3 or 4 years that have passed since he wrote Ministry of the Future have given him more room for optimism that we will successfully address climate change. On the other hand, Amitav Ghosh another novelist who has been doing some non-fiction writing on climate change, looks at the same period and finds reason to be pessimistic. Probably both writers would qualify such categorical statements, but that's the drift. Others like Yanis Varafoukis, Noam Chomsky, Miguel Fuentes and (ultimate pessimist) Guy McPherson have been weighing in on the subject.

None of these are climate change experts. They are, like all of us, following the accumulating studies and news reports, while trying to understand and figure out how to address the changes that are unfolding. What we individually bring to the picture is the life experience that contributes to our perspective and to our tendency towards positive or negative thinking.

My own life experience comes from observing the Israeli - Palestinian conflict while living in a small Jewish - Arab community. There have been moments of great optimism and of pessimism. The optimism at the moment of the Oslo accords and the pessimism at the breakdown and second intifada of 2001, and everything since. As a community we haven't given up. In talks to groups of visitors, I have often said that a source of optimism is the knowledge that the two peoples are stuck together, clinging to the same bit of land. Since neither side can rid itself of the other, the only choice is to determine how to live together. They can either keep fighting or find a way to make peace, and my assumption is that common sense will eventually prevail.

But it's only an assumption. They might conceivably go on fighting forever, or until one side grinds down the other and wins. The balance of power is not equal, but it never has been. History favors first one warring faction then the other.

A further insight is that peace is never a static position that, once achieved, can be taken for granted. It's part of an ever-changing continuum. Even if and when peace is attained, there needs to be a constant struggle to maintain it.

Within the larger reality of peace or the lack of it, there is our individual life and our responsibility to do the best that we can: to live life in conformity with our vision, to give our children an education that is conducive to that vision, etc. It isn't necessary, and is not advisable, to wait for geo-political peace in order to live according to our vision of peace.

So, when I look at climate change, it's this experience that I bring to it. A knowledge that, like the Jewish - Palestinian conflict, it's a process whose resolution I will not see in my lifetime. I may see an accumulation of changes; some that are negative, maybe devastating; adaptations that bring cause for optimism. But whatever I live to see, it won't be the end. The only thing that's irreversible for us, as a species, is human extinction.

If I want humanity to reduce its carbon emissions and to live in greater harmony with nature, I can start by doing so personally, to the extent that individual choices can be made. Much of what we do is governed by large systems that are beyond our control, such as the sources of the energy we use. However other areas, such as diet and the purchase of goods, are subject to personal choice. And usually, what is good and healthy for the individual turns out to be what's good for humanity and the biosphere.

Much of the discussion on climate change revolves around the psychological conundrum of whether it is advisable to issue dire warnings of the coming apocalypse, or whether this will only lead to defeatism. That's not for me to say. I'm not in the business of trying to influence anybody; why should anyone listen? So I don't care; can afford to be honest.

Consideration of the future may invite optimism or pessimism. But whether humanity will eventually prevail does not need to influence our current decisions. We already know enough in order to make informed, healthy choices about how to live, individually and collectively. The closer we align with the objective of reducing our negative impact upon the planet, the greater will be the chances of our survival.

Alchemy

Yesterday evening I finished watching the first season of "The Bear", which somehow lives up to all the rave reviews of the critics. It does so more on account of its presenting a situation than for its storyline - the plot for all of the first season could be summarized in two or three lines.

So we watch it because we find the characters interesting; because as humans we are interested in humans. The show's humanity is the reason for its success. Nobody gets fired, no matter how outrageous their behavior, because they need each other; they are in it together. How great it would be if this were the case in real life.

There was a teacher at our village school - she taught the children how to make art out of garbage, recycling or reassembling materials that people would dump outside her door- like cardboard or old magazines - or which she would bring from nearby factories. Using the materials at hand was also how she would relate to human beings: it might sometimes be more convenient to replace them but, since anyway we are all flawed things, it is more sensible to learn how to work most effectively with the ones that are here with us.

The same lesson has to be internalized and applied to ourselves, with whom we are also stuck; our tally of fatal flaws, past traumas, weaknesses and fears. It's a matter of working with all these elements and alchemizing the crap. Like shining a pair of beat-up old shoes; like cobbling together a raft to save us from the flood. Perfection is a bricolage of broken parts. Or, seen differently, imperfection is maya, illusion, and we are already perfect as we are. The effect is always present in the cause, the manifest in the unmanifest.

World Wide Waste

There's a website called "World Wide Waste" that is dedicated to the subject of digital waste and its costs to the environment. It seems to me that it is less of a subject for the individual than for the corporations, although we are all guilty of over-streaming. I wonder whether the environmental costs of internet streaming is greater than reliance upon satelites? It may be that since both exist, it makes little difference. It must be better to use videoconferencing than traveling and commuting. Harari makes the point that we don't really have an energy problem - there is infinite energy that we could obtain. It's just a technological and an environmental problem. If we can only solve the 21st century technological problems of polluting industries, we will be able to enjoy the tech advantages, but, along the way, we are making terrible misjudgments. Humans are inherently wasteful. We need to cut down on packaging and processed foods, products that are wasteful.

Of course, writing these words, I'm aware that this is actually delusional and that we are still on the way to annihilation. I can make personal improvements, but the problems are endemic. Seeing the wasterfulness of Americans, of my brother for example, there is little hope for humanity. And no doubt in Israel too I am unaware of the way many people are living. But there is satisfaction whenever one can make personal good decisions. These can be shared and communicated over our own networks in order to help popularize environmental consciousness.

Yes, despite the luxury of an independent, non-connected blog, it makes much more sense to communicate ideas that to keep them to oneself. I simply haven't cracked the technique of doing it in a manner that doesn't lead to disgust or embarrassment. Effective communication requires a style that is far removed from my slow circumlocution and roundabout thinking. Writers like George Monbiot are effective communicators, though even they manage to invoke the ire of folks who are quite near to them ideologically. And then there are the superstars, like Michael Moore, who also make terrible mistakes, unforgivable errors, which create great damage. So where does that leave someone like me? I guess it is all about an honest dialogue. Actually, I have little patience for one.

It's useful to do lots of reading I think I prefer to do my thinking, my writing or communicating as a monologue. Blogging is better for me than a Reddit-style back-and-forth, and even one-line responses to my posts bother me immensely. So that's how I end up with a blog that does not permit responses, or simply a private journal. The dialogue is simply me reading what other people have said, and then writing, in my own fashion, reflections on what I have read; or sometimes my own thoughts. There are folks who are better than me for the true dialogue. If am more private, it isn't arrogance, exactly, but the need for personal space. It's the reason that it is much easier for me to write offline, by hand, in a personal journal, than to write blog posts. But there is still room to transcribe these later.

Planet of the Humans (again)

Reading George Monbiot’s critique of “Planet of the Humans” I appreciated his ability to sift through the many details, see where the errors lie and then state the ways in which the film is inaccurate, dangerous and damaging to the cause that it is supposedly trying to support. Environmentalists face so many challenges from the political right and those with vested interests who wish to undermine challenges to the continued degradation of the biosphere.

Perhaps I misinterpreted the film, or saw what I wanted to see in it. Or perhaps I’m right after all. It’s true that everyone experiences reality according to their individual tendencies. What dawned on me while watching it was that however careful we are to produce cleaner forms of energy, and however efficient those processes become, we will simply be encouraged to consume more, and it is built into the capitalist system and our own species’ nature to do so. We will not be able to reverse the destruction because the more we produce, the more we will use. I don’t see this as being a problem of the developing world and its burgeoning population (and growing needs), but a challenge to be addressed by those who are at the pinnacle of progress – who are also the heaviest consumers. They need to provide leadership in learning how to use less, not more.

But I don’t think they will do so.

"Planet of the Humans"

I watched this movie, (it’s available free on YouTube) by Jeff Gibbs and produced by Michael Moore, as there have been appeals from the Green movement to take it down and, who knows, maybe they’ll succeed. While the film is, as critics say, no doubt hurtful to efforts to lobby for greener solutions, I think the central thesis of the film is correct, that without addressing the root causes of our environmental problems – overpopulation and unrestrained economic growth – any technological fixes we try to find will not work. (Update: See George Monbiot’s critique of the film.)

The main problem is capitalism, and our dependence on its fruits. Without addressing it, greener energy production, even if it turns out to be better than the dismal examples shown in the movie, is only going to increase demand. Just as improving the roads to avoid traffic congestion encourages more people to drive to work rather than take the bus, so the traffic congestion remains.

As a species we expand until it is no longer possible to meet our demands. When we reach that point, it seems than we will not gently restrain ourselves but, like the boom and bust economy, reach a point of total breakdown. That will be a tragedy, a holocaust, for our ourselves or our forebears, as well as for most of the larger life-forms on the planet, because it will coincide with the collapse of the entire biosphere.

It’s capitalism that is driving us to the apocalypse, of course, but turning capitalism into a scapegoat is not the solution. Our economic system is a product of the way we are. It’s something more fundamental that we need to change. And yet, if we can learn anything from ecology, it is that systems are intertwined and that no one of us exists in isolation, independently from the whole. So it is not as if I, as “an individual” can change anything. We effect change as a group, as a race, as a species, and in conjunction with every other species.

The film says that change can only begin with awareness. Awareness, if it is integral, and not just intellectual, can bring change. We’ve got to start somewhere. Let’s start by admitting that we exist in symbiosis with other species in a biosphere that has enough for all of us, if we only limit our share to that which we actually need, and leave enough for everyone else. If we don’t do that, we will soon reach a stage where we will have less than we need (and then we will die). But what constitutes a “need”? If we are asking that question, it probably means we are so remote from our actual needs that we have forgotten. We can begin by reducing our consumption and finding out for ourselves.

Creating a buzz: Turkish beekeepers risk life and limb to make mad honey

"History is littered with stories of the psychoactive properties of deli bal, still produced today in the Kaçkar mountains"

Source: Creating a buzz: Turkish beekeepers risk life and limb to make mad honey | World news

The Guardian

Of course, the Sanskrit word for honey, madhu, like mead (the ancient drink made with honey) and mad (which is Sanskrit for hilarity, rapture) all come from the same Indo-European root.

Dharma as a spiritual practice that can maybe save the planet

Making clothes last longer

The Guardian has a very informative article on making clothes last longer, with many links to related matters, such as buying second-hand, preferred methods for laundering, which fabrics to buy, how to fix clothes, etc. If we think of our three essential needs – food, clothing, shelter – obviously looking after clothes is one of the most important subjects to learn about, as we go further into the climate emergency. Last week they had a related article about an organization that is working with clothing companies to improve the manufacture of jeans.