Human Affect On The Environment Wake Up call

SpaceTravel22

1 Aug 2013

How are humans contributing to the environment?

Suzanne Boorsch on Francesco Berlinghieri’s Geographia – Mondays at Beinecke, November 14, 2022

Beinecke Library at Yale – Nov 21, 2022

Suzanne Boorsch, an art historian who specializes in Renaissance old master prints and the former curator of prints and drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery, discusses Francesco Berlinghieri’s Geographia, Florence, 1482, in conjunction with the Beinecke Library exhibition, The World in Maps, 1400-1600. Building on the work of authors such as Ptolemy, Francesco Berlinghieri (1440–1501) compiled his Geographia in the last decades of the fifteenth century. With a commentary in verse, Geographia contains a number of additional maps, expanding the traditional repertoire of Ptolemy’s work. This particular volume includes thirty-one maps, many of which fold out to reveal detailed visions of various parts of the world. This map, for example, covers much of Europe (EVROP), northern Africa (APHRICA), and western Asia. Along the bottom of the map, a section is labeled TERRA INCOGNITA, or “unknown land.” Because this map represents a great deal of area of which the mapmaker had little or no knowledge, a number of unusual geographic features are essentially imaginary. For example, large, round lakes randomly dot northern Africa, and the Indian Ocean is hemmed in on all sides by coasts unfamiliar to the Italian draftsman.

The Chris Hedges Report: Noam Chomsky

The Real News Network – Oct 21, 2022

In a wide-ranging discussion, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges discuss the war in Ukraine, the rising tide of global fascism, the climate catastrophe, and the role left to public intellectuals in an increasingly restrictive and censored media environment. Noam Chomsky is the author of more than 150 books on topics that include linguistics, the press, the inner workings of empire, and the war industry.

The Chris Hedges Report: Noam Chomsky, Pt 2

The Real News NetworkOct 28, 2022

World-renowned linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, essayist, and political activist Noam Chomsky returns to The Chris Hedges Report to continue their discussion on contemporary fascism, the war in Ukraine, and the tasks of the left in a time of ecological and political crisis. You can watch the first part of this two-part interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Vue… Noam Chomsky is the author of more than 150 books on topics that include linguistics, the press, the inner workings of empire, and the war industry. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include “Hegemony or Survival,” “For Reasons of State,” “American Power and the New Mandarins,” “Understanding Power,” “The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, On Language, Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” “The Fateful Triangle,” and many others. His latest book is “Notes on Resistance; Interviews by David Barsamian.” Studio: Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET: https://therealnews.com/chris-hedges-…

Listen to episode podcasts and find bonus content at The Chris Hedges Report Substack: https://chrishedges.substack.com/

Dr. Gabor Maté on “The Myth of Normal,” Healing in a Toxic Culture & How Capitalism Fuels Addiction

Democracy Now!Nov 24, 2022

In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” “The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people,” says Maté, who argues in his book that “psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease.” He says healing requires a reconnection between the mind and the body, which can be achieved through cultivating a sense of community, meaning, belonging and purpose. Maté also discusses how the healthcare system has harmfully promoted the “mechanization of birth,” how the lack of social services for parents has led to “a massive abandonment of infants,” and how capitalism has fueled addiction and the rise of youth suicide rates.

Lakota Historian Nick Estes on Thanksgiving, Settler Colonialism & Continuing Indigenous Resistance

Democracy Now!Nov 24, 2022

Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about Thanksgiving and his book “Our History Is the Future,” and the historic fight against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

How will businesses use the metaverse?

The Economist – Nov 24, 2022

The metaverse could offer multi-trillion-dollar opportunities for businesses in the long term, with the potential to transform many aspects of daily life. 00:00 – How the metaverse could transform our daily lives 01:22 – How filmmakers are using metaverse technology 02:30 – What is the metaverse? 04:09 – An opportunity for creative industries 05:59 – How tech titans are profiting off the metaverse 06:53 – What is Roblox? 09:51 – Gen Z: metaverse natives 10:48 – How the metaverse could help climate change responses 12:15 – What is a digital twin? 14:33 – What’s missing from the metaverse? 16:26 – How mixed reality devices are transforming the military and health care 19:41 – What’s next? Sign up to our science newsletter to keep up to date: https://econ.st/3Mn3IR3 Read more about virtual realities: https://econ.st/3SZXkBY Listen to our podcast about how the metaverse is going mainstream: https://econ.st/3yz8qFR What are the video-game industry’s metaverse ambitions? https://econ.st/3S3Kmlq What are America’s largest technology firms investing in? https://econ.st/3EAT8UE Building a metaverse with Chinese characteristics: https://econ.st/3CrhtK6 Virtual-property prices are going through the roof: https://econ.st/3fPTcFJ Tomorrow’s soldiers will have their reality augmented: https://econ.st/3g1AdZ4 How can augmented reality help treat covid-19? https://econ.st/3EEXRVo The race to digitally preserve Ukraine’s buildings and monuments: https://econ.st/3RTL4RR

China expands lockdowns as COVID-19 cases hit daily record

euronews – Nov 24, 2022

Pandemic lockdowns are expanding across China as the number of new COVID-19 cases rose by 31,444 on Thursday. The daily caseload has been steadily increasing. Meanwhile authorities reported China’s first COVID-19 deaths in six months this week, bringing the total to 5,232.

Grantham Annual Lecture 2022: The ever-growing climate movement: Culture, creativity and climate

Grantham Imperial – Nov 24, 2022

Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing culture today. Performing arts, social practices, festive events and traditional knowledge are all vulnerable on our changing planet. But cultural influence also holds the key to perceiving the challenges of climate change and coalescing around solutions.

Despite the power of the creative industries to explore uncertainty or inspire change, the cultural sector is largely absent from scientists’, governments’ and policymakers’ discussions on climate change. Cultural solutions are not systematically integrated into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement, or IPCC Assessment Reports. However, it is stories and narratives, rather than raw information, that motivate or demotivate climate action. Creativity itself is essential for finding new solutions to environmental challenges and a great space exists for creatives themselves to step up.

This event will begin with a keynote speech from Brian Eno, a highly influential musician, producer, visual artist and activist who as a co-founder of EarthPercent is reforming the music industry’s action towards climate change. This will be followed by a panel discussion that will include other artists and creators of culture, chaired by Baroness Lola Young, British actress, author, political and sustainable fashion activist and Chancellor of the University of Nottingham. The panel will discuss how culture can shape collective mobilisation, individual behaviour-change and action in tackling climate change in our modern world.

Keynote address:
– Brian Eno, musician, producer, visual artist and activist

Panel discussion alongside Brian Eno:
– Nilesha Chauvet, Managing Director, GOOD Agency
– Jason deCaires Taylor, Sculptor and creator of the world’s first underwater sculpture park
– Carly McLachlan, Professor of Climate and Energy Policy, University of Manchester

Dr. Herman Daly: Sustainability & the Scale of the Economy

Gund Institute for Environment – Jun 17, 2011

Sustainability and the Scale of the Economy March 25, 2003 University of Maryland A Production of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, an affiliate of the Rubenstein School for Environment & Natural Resources at the University of Vermont The Gund Institute is a transdisciplinary research, teaching, and service organization focused on developing integrative solutions to society’s most pressing problems. We conduct integrative research and service-learning projects on a broad range of topics, offer hands-on learning through our problem-solving workshops and courses, develop online teaching resources and international collaborations through metacourses, and support professional and graduate education through our Graduate Certificates in Ecological Economics and Ecological Design. Learn more about the Gund community of students, scholars and practitioners by exploring our news, publications, and video archives, then contact us to help us build a sustainable, widely shared quality of life. For more information visit: uvm.edu/​giee/

Herman Daly, 84, Who Challenged the Economic Gospel of Growth, Dies – The New York Times

Herman Daly teaching at Vanderbilt University in 1969. Arguing against economic growth, he said, was like poking “a big hornets’ nest with a short stick.”Credit…via Daly Family

Perhaps the best-known ecological economist, he faulted his mainstream peers for failing to account for the environmental harm growth can bring.

By Ed Shanahan – Nov. 8, 2022

Herman Daly, who for more than 50 years argued that the economic gospel of growth as synonymous with prosperity and progress was fundamentally, and dangerously, flawed because it ignored its associated costs, especially the depletion of natural resources and the pollution it engenders, died on Oct. 28 in Richmond, Va. He was 84.

The death, at a hospital, was caused by a brain hemorrhage, his daughter Karen Daly Junker said.

Dr. Daly, an ecological economist, was almost surely his field’s chief popularizer through his more than a dozen books and many journal articles, his faculty positions at the University of Maryland and, earlier, Louisiana State University, and his somewhat incongruous six-year stint at the World Bank.

Although he was branded a heretic for his theories — or, worse, ignored — among traditional economists, he had plenty of adherents, who saw him as prophetic for anticipating climate change’s increasingly harmful impact and the vast sums of money needed to address it.

“His ideas are really relevant now, unlike most other economists, whose ideas tend to lose relevance as time passes and circumstances change,” Peter A. Victor, an ecological economist and the author of the 2021 biography “Herman Daly’s Economics for a Full World,” said in a phone interview.

One of Dr. Daly’s key principles was that growth is “uneconomic” when its costs outweigh its benefits. That idea was tied to another: Earth, once empty, is now full — of people and what they produce — and charting a more sustainable path requires the use of fewer natural resources and the making of less waste.

“That’s not really hard to understand,” Dr. Daly said in a 2011 video interview with WWF Sweden. “I can explain that to my grandchildren.”

Yet another foundational concept was that the economy does not exist apart from the Earth’s biosphere but within it, and that its scale is limited by its reliance on finite natural resources.

Such propositions might seem simple, but arguing against economic growth, Dr. Daly wrote in a foreword to Mr. Victor’s book, was like poking “a big hornets’ nest with a short stick.”

“It rudely upsets a very large and comfortable consensus,” he added.

He urged politicians, governments and other economists to abandon the relentless pursuit of growth in favor of a so-called steady-state economy, which would achieve a stable balance between supporting human life and preserving the environment. He employed an aircraft metaphor to explain his preferred approach.

“The failure of a growth economy to grow is a disaster,” he told The New York Times Magazine in a profile of him this year. “The success of a steady-state economy not to grow is not a disaster. It’s like the difference between an airplane and a helicopter. An airplane is designed for forward motion. If an airplane has to stand still, it’ll crash. A helicopter is designed to stand still, like a hummingbird.”

He proposed replacing gross domestic product with metrics like an “index of sustainable economic welfare,” which would tally not just the value of goods and services produced but also the ecological harm done in the process. To him, “sustainable growth” was nonsensical; “sustainable development” was the goal.

In an interview, Joshua Farley, an economist and co-author with Dr. Daly of “Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications” (2004), boiled his colleague’s animating philosophy down concisely: “More isn’t always better.”

Dr. Daly’s economic beliefs were grounded in hard sciences like the laws of thermodynamics, but also in ethical ideals, like the fair distribution of wealth, and in his faith as a Methodist who saw the Earth as the handiwork of an almighty creator.

Even as his theories gained currency in recent years, they remained outside economic thinking’s mainstream. He did not seem to mind.

“My duty is to do the best I can and put out some ideas,” he said in The Times Magazine interview. “Whether the seed that I plant is going to grow is not up to me. It’s just up to me to plant it and water it.”

Herman Edward Daly was born on July 2l, l938, in Houston to Edward Joseph Daly, who owned a service station in Beaumont, Texas, where the family lived at the time, and Mildred (Herrmann) Daly, a homemaker who had worked as a bookkeeper before marrying. The family later moved to Houston, where Ed Daly opened a hardware store.

…(read more).

See related:

• Dr. Herman Daly: Sustainability & the Scale of the Economy
• Herman Daly, “Economics for a Full World,” Great Transition Initiative (June 2015).
• Ecology in economics, counting nature in
• Herman Daly, Ph.D., 13 Nov. 2007
• No More Room for Growth – Herman Daly at the World Bank 
• Herman Daly on the Economy & the Environment
• Herman Daly’s Economics for a Full World | Book launch event, Nov 2021
• The Law & The Profits vs. Natural Law & The Prophet: Herman Daly & the Future of the Human Prospect 
• “Transition Studies” … because extinction is not the goal…and
• To Respect the Earth’s Limits — or Push Them? – Bill McKibben – The New York Times
• The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World – Charles Mann
• Misplaced Metaphors in the Anthropocene (Beware of Cultural Clichés & Dangerous Metaphors) | Tim Weiskel
• The Fatal Consequences of a Misplaced Metaphor: The “Agricultural Industry” & The Delusion of Infinite Growth in A Finite Ecosystem | EV & N 361 | CCTV
• Global-Balliol
• Setting the Record Straight: The Depth, Severity and History of the Scientific Evidence on Earth’s Unfolding Climate Catastrophe
• Why Transition Studies?

* * *