Dalai Lama: URGENCY ALERT!

This is excerpted from the Dalai Lama's latest book,

and is deeply relevant to us all — young and old.

Excellent and vitally needed wisdom, truth,

compassion, vision, and hope. — Molly

  

 This Is the New World That You Will

Bequeath To Your Children

I am calling on you to bring about a revolution motivated by compassion, for the sake of your own children and future generations. When Westerners speak of "humanity," they are generally referring to the present. Indeed, past generations of humankind count for little. That of the future is yet to come. All that matters from a Western perspective is today's generation and its immediate interests. But responsibility is universal only if it encompasses consideration for those who come after us. We cannot overlook the fact that global population, which tripled in the twentieth century, will have multiplied two or threefold by the end of this century. 

According to current patterns of growth, the development of the global economy entails excessively high levels of energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions and deforestation. If we do not change our behaviour there will be environmental degradation across the globe, surpassing everything that we have seen so far. I have read scientific studies: they give us only three years to drastically reduce our current rates of consumption, which are the cause of extreme carbon dioxide emissions. By 2020 it will already be too late. Global warming is out of control; fatal heat waves will be triggered across all five continents, along with a rise in sea levels. Time is not on our side, which is why I am calling on all young millennials to hasten this radical revolution. 

My young friends, brothers and sisters, in the course of my life I have been witness to our changing world. Today we face such dangers that it is vital that we do not bury our heads in the sand. For those environmental problems that have a natural cause, or that are seismic, unstoppable catastrophes, you will not necessarily mange to find solutions. And because of global warming, calamities such as hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, droughts and landslides will only increase in intensity. The only solution will be to face it all with courage and determination, standing shoulder to shoulder with your fellow citizens, and showing fraternal solidarity and loving-kindness towards the most vulnerable.

It is only through mutual support and cooperation that you will be able to contain disasters that are caused by economic and social injustice and are fueled by greed, selfishness and other negative states of mind. It you shift your consciousness towards greater benevolence and responsibility, you  will find real solutions. The earth is giving you clear signs of the sweeping consequences of unconscious human behaviour. For the first time in history, the future of humanity depends on the upcoming generation: yours. You are responsible for the wellbeing of billions of humans and all manner of living species sharing the adventure of life on earth. It is up to you to protect natural resources and guard over air, water, oceans, forests, fauna and flora. To do so, it is essential that you realise your potential for love and compassion in order to care for the earth. Learn to love it through sharing it, rather than striving to possess it, and thereby destroying it.

No doubt, it will take another twenty or thirty years for the Revolution of Compassion to generate the necessary changes in human behaviour. But after that change comes about, you will have the joy of witnessing the emergence of a compassionate and accountable humanity. This is the new world the you will bequeath to your children and to your children's children. They will grow up in a united human family, aware of being one body, one consciousness. Guard your youthful enthusiasm and optimism as you move towards a fairer and happier tomorrow.

— His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Excerpted from A Call For Revolution:

A Vision For the Future

Climate Change: A Timeline

We're somewhere around "Oops" and "Fuck". It started with "climate change is real." Early on people just believed the science. Then the extractive energy corporations spent millions and millions of dollars to convince them otherwise. It worked. We should not forget that. These are the true criminals who have created the greatest crimes against humanity and all of life. — Molly
 

To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need To Take On Capitalism

Such an important piece. It’s so vital to continue to illuminate that global warming is the most urgent issue of our time and all times. — Molly

 As we head for the edge of a climate change cliff, neoliberal market capitalism is chewing up the biosphere and the lives of everyone in it. But it’s not too late to act.

By Kim Stanley Robinson

A recent report released by the International Panel on Climate Change reaffirmed what everyone already knows: We are in big trouble. The billions of tons of greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels have put us on pace for a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures within the next two decades, which would move us beyond humanity’s ability to claw back to any kind of normalcy without extraordinary measures. It’s quite possible we could trigger the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, a catastrophe that would inevitably hammer human civilization and endanger billions of lives. Even rich people will be affected — there’ll be no escaping, not even in New Zealand, not even to Mars.

I first became aware of all this when I visited Antarctica in 1995. There was still plenty of ice down there, of course. But all the scientists there were already talking about climate change, describing to each other and to me the growing body of evidence that the world was warming as a result of our dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I realized that even I had witnessed some of this evidence; the little glaciers I had been visiting in California’s Sierra Nevada were all about half the size they had been when I first saw them in the early 1970s. That was a small part of something much larger. Climate change was really happening, the scientists told me, but the news wasn’t spreading or having an effect.

In truth, it was a hard story to tell, and I struggled to find a way to express it all in a novel, until the findings from the Greenland ice core studies gave me the material for a trilogy of books informally called Science in the Capital (now in one volume as Green Earth). More recently, the real possibility of rapid sea level rise inspired me to write New York 2140; and really, all of my work over the last 20 years has been influenced by the coming reality of climate change. If you write the kind of science fiction I do, the topic can’t be avoided — and it’s the kind of story that science fiction is uniquely positioned to tell.

Now it no longer seems like science fiction; the future has crashed into the present, and everyone who’s willing to look can see what we’re headed for. But what can we do about it? And is it too late for us to act?

It’s late, yes, but not too late. There are actions we can take now that will help the situation immensely. Because the other vast, undeniable truth that goes hand in hand with the reality of our changing climate — the crux and cause of the problem — is that we live under a global capitalist system, in which the market rules. And that system’s oversimple algorithm, which measures priceless things in terms of quarterly profit and shareholder value, is mindlessly chewing up the biosphere and the lives of everyone in it. It’s like the hypothetical superintelligent AIportrayed in certain science fiction stories, which, in trying to maximize something like strawberry production, turns the whole world into a strawberry patch — thereby killing off all humans in the process as impediments to the stated goal.

This market that rules the world also systematically underprices things. Sellers compete to charge less than each other, eventually lowering their prices below what they paid to make their products in the first place. Those costs are ignored or hidden in various ways, but they are never unpaid; they are merely translated into other, more dangerous currencies. Cutting labor costs? That means hurting workers. Externalizing environmental costs? That means pollution damaging the biosphere, which ultimately is our extended body and our life-support system. The upshot is this: Neoliberal market capitalism, an experiment in power that since 1980 has been doubling down on the previous forms of capitalism, is wrecking people’s lives and creating a climate catastrophe.

Only the richest people on Earth defend this system, perhaps because they benefit enough in the present, and are still insulated enough from the impacts, to outweigh in their minds the obvious costs to others and our future. They nervously assure each other that things are okay, at Davos and elsewhere, but they can only hope things will hold together through their lifetimes. Everyone else feels precarious, or is already in a world of hurt.

So climate change and capitalism are two parts of the same problem; they are effect and cause. And capitalism is not only driving climate change, but also our response to it — by influencing government policy, and the development of new technology, and our basic understanding of the options open to us as we fight for a planet that can sustain life. We need to fix our economic systems, meaning our political systems, in order to fix climate change.

Please continue this article here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kimstanleyrobinson/climate-change-capitalism-kim-stanley-robinson?fbclid=IwAR21V4qTc7ucSsENpQf8WItF0JpOSqOHBHiv5An5jvC5unVn6KcbeIzKzaI

Carl Sagan: When We View the Earth From Space

National boundaries are not evident when we 

view the Earth from space.

 
Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms 

are a little difficult to maintain when we see our 

planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an 

inconspicuous point of light against the bastion 

and citadel of the stars.
 

— Carl Sagan

Rainer Maria Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII

 

Want the change.  Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

 

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

 

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

 

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive.  And Daphne, becoming
a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

 

— Rainer Maria Rilke