Civilisation Ends With a Shutdown of Human Concern

George Monbiot asks if we are there already?

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world. Cormac McCarthy's book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot...

...It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist's core beliefs. I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.

- The Guardian

Why Cheney Really Is That Bad

The vice president is the single greatest threat to American and international security in the world today. Not Osama Bin Laden. Not the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Not Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il. Not al-Qaida, the Taliban, or Jose Padilla himself. Not even George W. Bush can lay claim to this title. It is Dick Cheney’s alone.

- Common Dreams

15 Reasons to Stop Avoiding Vegetarianism

Live longer, lower your weight, slash pollution and twelve other good reasons to start cutting meat out of your diet. - AlterNet

What if Al Gore Were Arrested?

Fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate change evangelism, Al Gore is apparently considering an invitation from a prominent environmental group to engage in civil disobedience against the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

Rainforest Action Network issued the invitation to the former Vice President, according to RAN executive director Michael Brune. The San Francisco-based group has a twenty-year history of protesting against destructive logging practices and other causes of climate change; it specializes in targeting corporations as much as governments.

"We came across a quote from Gore in an interview with [New York Times] columnist Nicholas Kristof back in August, saying he didn't understand, quote, 'Why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them constructing new coal-fired power plants,'" said Brune. "We thought, 'Great idea!' That's the kind of activism we do at RAN. So we decided to invite Gore to join us. - Yahoo News

Atlanta, GA

The situation has become so serious that officials in Atlanta, where rainfall totals are more than 16 inches below normal, said they could run out of drinking water in a matter of weeks. - ABC NEWS

We Just Passed the Point of No Return

The global economic boom has accelerated greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold not expected for a decade and could potentially cause irreversible climate change, said one of Australia's leading scientists.

Tim Flannery, a world recognised climate change scientist and Australian of the Year in 2007, said a U.N. international climate change report due in November will show that greenhouse gases have already reached a dangerous level.
Photo

Flannery said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will show that greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in mid-2005 had reached about 455 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent -- a level not expected for another 10 years. - Reuters

It is time for a little geo-engineering? I think so.

Greenpeace Takes Down Power Plant

Environmental campaigners today claimed to have taken over a power station in Kent in a protest designed to stop the prime minister, Gordon Brown, from approving the UK's first new coal plant in more than 30 years.

Just after 5am this morning, 50 Greenpeace volunteers entered Kingsnorth coal-fired power station. One group immobilised the conveyor belts carrying coal into the plant and chained themselves to the machinery. A second group with enough provisions to last for several days, began scaling a 200m ladder up the chimney which they painted with the words "Gordon Bin It". - The Guardian

October Heat Ruins Chicago Marathon

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Organizers shut down the course four hours after the start of Sunday's Chicago Marathon because of 88-degree heat and sweltering humidity that left one runner dead and sent at least 49 to area hospitals. Another 250 were treated at the site. - CNN

Secede From America

The Middlebury Institute and the Second Vermont Republic are Northern secessionist organizations, and they have formed an unlikely alliance with the League of the South to hold a Secessionist Convention in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
-Boston Magazine

Where Did All the Ice Go?

Getting nervous? Read this New York Times article, they also have detailed James Lovelock's latest plan to save the Earth.