Vote as if the Future of Humanity Depends on It

I try to steer clear of politics in this blog, as there are so many other voices far more informed and eloquent than mine addressing this topic.  But, I have to say it, aside from watching the United States veer into an authoritarian dictatorship and the end of the American democratic experiment under Trump, aside from being the ONLY nation in the world, under Trump, to be withdrawn from the Paris Accord, aside from having the highest uncontrolled incidence of Covid19, under Trump and isolated by quarantine from the rest of the world, even Canada..............I agree with this writer and his article, and felt I needed to post it.  If you are a U.S. citizen, and care about the planet and the lives of your children and their children, vote.  

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-vote-trump/

Vote as if the Climate and the Future of Humanity Depend on It—Because They Do

Trump wants to steer us straight onto the rocks. This election may be humanity’s last shot to prevent utter climate catastrophe.

By Bill McKibben

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

To understand the planetary importance of this autumn’s presidential election, check the calendar. Voting ends on November 3—and by a fluke of timing, on the morning of November 4 the United States is scheduled to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

President Trump announced that we would abrogate our Paris commitments during a Rose Garden speech in 2017. But under the terms of the accords, it takes three years to formalize the withdrawal. So on Election Day it won’t be just Americans watching: The people of the world will see whether the country that has poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other over the course of history will become the only country that refuses to cooperate in the one international effort to do something about the climate crisis.

Trump’s withdrawal benefited oil executives, who have donated millions of dollars to his reelection campaign, and the small, strange fringe of climate deniers who continue to insist that the planet is cooling. But most people living in the rational world were appalled. Polling showed widespread opposition, and by some measures, Trump is more out of line with the American populace on environmental issues than any other. In his withdrawal announcement he said he’d been elected “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”; before the day was out, Pittsburgh’s mayor had pledged that his city would follow the guidelines set in the French capital. Young people, above all, have despised the president’s climate moves: Poll after poll shows that climate change is a top-tier issue with them and often the most important one—mostly, I think, because they’ve come to understand how tightly linked it is not just to their future but to questions of justice, equity, and race.

Here’s the truth: At this late date, meeting the promises set in Paris will be nowhere near enough. If you add up the various pledges that nations made at that conference, they plan on moving so timidly that the planet’s temperature will still rise more than 3 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels. So far, we’ve raised the mercury 1 degree Celsius, and that’s been enough to melt millions of square miles of ice in the Arctic, extend fire seasons for months, and dramatically alter the planet’s rainfall patterns. Settling for 3 degrees is kind of like writing a global suicide note.

Happily, we could go much faster if we wanted. The price of solar and wind power has fallen so fast and so far in the last few years that they are now the cheapest power on earth. There are plenty of calculations to show it will soon be cheaper to build solar and wind farms than to operate the fossil fuel power stations we’ve already built. Climate-smart investments are also better for workers and economic equality. “We need to have climate justice, which means to invest in green energy, [which] creates three times more jobs than to invest in fossil fuel energy,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in an interview with Covering Climate Now in September. If we wanted to make it happen, in other words, an energy revolution is entirely possible. The best new study shows that the United States could cut its current power sector emissions 80 percent by 2035 and create 20 million jobs along the way.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris haven’t pledged to move that quickly, but their climate plan is the farthest-reaching of any presidential ticket in history. More to the point, we can pressure them to go farther and faster. Already, seeing the polling on the wall, they’ve adopted many of the proposals of climate stalwarts like Washington Governor Jay Inslee. A team of Biden and Bernie Sanders representatives worked out a pragmatic but powerful compromise in talks before the Democratic National Convention; the Biden-Harris ticket seems primed to use a transition to green energy as a crucial part of a push to rebuild the pandemic-devastated economy.

Perhaps most important, they’ve pledged to try to lead the rest of the world in the climate fight. The United States has never really done this. Our role as the single biggest producer of hydrocarbons has meant that our response to global warming has always been crippled by the political power of Big Oil. But that power has begun to slip. Once the biggest economic force on the planet, the oil industry is a shadow of its former self. (You could buy all the oil companies in America for less than the cost of Apple; Tesla is worth more than any other auto company on earth.) And so it’s possible that the hammerlock on policy exercised by this reckless industry will loosen if Trump is beaten.

But only if he’s beaten. Four more years will be enough to cement in place his anti-environmental policies and to make sure it’s too late to really change course. The world’s climate scientists declared in 2018 that if we had any chance of meeting sane climate targets, we had to cut emissions almost in half by 2030. That’s less than 10 years away. We’re at the last possible moment to turn the wheel of the supertanker that is our government. Captain Trump wants to steer us straight onto the rocks, mumbling all the while about hoaxes. If we let him do it, history won’t forgive us. Nor will the rest of the world.

Bill McKibben is the founder of climate change campaign 350.org, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of the new book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.

On climate change in California:

https://laist.com/2018/08/06/california_has_had_a_monster_wildfire_every_year_for_the_past_7_years.php

On Trump trying to incite civil war:

"To Trump and his core enablers and supporters, the laws of Trump Nation authorize him to do whatever he wants"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/27/donald-trump-american-civil-war-joe-biden-republicans-democrats-robert-reich

Greenland is rapidly melting:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/greenland-is-melting-at-some-of-the-fastest-rates-in-12-000-years/

Remote Viewing the Future with Stephan A. Schwartz

I find the interview below with a famous explorer of the paranormal and consciousness studies fascinating. Stephan A. Schwartz has extensively worked with the phenomenon of Remote Viewing and non-local consciousness since the early 70's, and the predictions he collated from hundreds of participants then for 2050, while unimaginable then, have, as he says in this 2017 interview, "come true" now. Among the things that remote viewers saw back then: the submersion of the entire state of Florida, virtual reality, the end of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the USA into politically independant bio-regions, religious terrorism, cities under domes because of increasing heat, and corporate ownership of governments.

(Recorded on February 5, 2017)

Stephan A. Schwartz is a Distinguished Consulting Faculty of Saybrook Institute, the columnist for the journal Explore, and editor of the daily web publication Schwartzreport.net. His other academic and research appointments include: Senior Fellow for Brain, Mind and Healing of the Samueli Institute; founder and Research Director of the Mobius laboratory. His government appointments included Special Assistant for Research and Analysis to the Chief of Naval Operations in the 1970's during the Cold War. Dr. Schwartz was the principal originator of research using Remote Viewing in archeology, and in the course of his studies used Remote Viewing to locate Cleopatra's Palace, Marc Antony's Timonium, ruins of the Lighthouse of Pharos, and sunken ships along the California coast.

He is the author of more than 130 technical reports and papers. His Books include: The Secret Vaults of Time, The Alexandria Project, Opening to the Infinite, and The 8 Laws of Change.
In the video presented here he discusses a project in which he was engaged from 1978 through 1996, at a time when Remote Viewing was being funded by the military. In one aspect of his work he asked individuals who attended his workshops and conferences to envision life in the year 2050 through his standard Remote Viewing protocol. He describes the care that he took to avoid suggesting answers himself. The astonishing results consistently described situations that have turned out to be true or possible for today, but were hard to imagine as probabilities in the 70's and 80's when he was doing the research. Among those "impossible" remote viewing trends was the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the development of virtual reality, and the submersion of the entire state of Florida due to Global Warming.

This interview is through New Thinking Allowed, and the host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, and Psi Development Systems. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980).

https://youtu.be/avbsEEz98Ck

Living With the Apocalypse (I.)

Newsweek, 2014

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

I bought the above Newsweek special while waiting in line at a checkout counter in a grocery store in 2014.  I still can't quite fathom what it means to be in a world where people graze a magazine while buying beer and cookies about groovy  "places to visit before they disappear" due to global warming.  Are there "soon to be extinct" bus tours?  Cruise ships that will take you on a champagne cruise to islands that are sinking beneath the ocean and/or plastic waste?

                         "The World will end not with a bang, but with a whimper."

                                           ......T.S. Elliot, "The Hollow Men"

 

I've always had an  apocalypse problem.  I  grew up with THE BOMB in the 50's, and remember the mini bomb shelter my father built, with its barrels of water and shelves full of cans of beans and tuna  fish.  It seems so hopeful, naive, and sad in retrospect,  to think that such a stock would help a family survive a nuclear war.  But like all unimaginable horrors it was, ultimately..... unimaginable. 

Later I encountered literary and film variations on an atomic "End of the World".  Like the poignant  movie  "On the Beach" with Gregory Peck ("Waltzing Matilda" still evokes that heart-breaking image of lines of people waiting for  their euthenasia pills as a radioactive cloud slowly approaches the shores of Australia, the song playing in the background).  Or "Fail Safe", or Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles , which envisioned an inevitable  nuclear war that exterminated what Bradbury seemingly   considered a hopelessly violent and destructive  humanity.

Rock Hudson in The Martian Chronicles (1979)

Being a native Californian,   I also grew up with the San Andreas Fault hanging over  our free-wheeling, hedonistic culture  (actually under us) with an omnipresent End Times inevitability as well.  Fueled by Hollywood and various New Age prophets "The Big One" with its visions of L.A. skyscrapers collapsing and the San Francisco Bay splitting off as the Continental Plates shifted were always underfoot.    In fact, the high stakes End Times has informed me and my generation, provoking  post-apocalyptic artforms, utopian communes and survivalist camps, dark Gothic  philosophies and Ascendance cults, as well as the truly  mind boggling denial that infects America, especially  now with Trump and regime.  For me The Apocalypse has always been a kind of backdrop to a life lived, as well, among astounding wonders and miracles of social change and new technology. 

I also came of age in the optimistic, activist 60's, a child of the wealthiest, largest, best educated generation the world has ever seen.  A time of huge possibility and creativity.   As a child I watched black and white tv (with tv dinners on tv trays) while I tried to understand images on the news about the  struggle to integrate the schools. I remember well the terrified faces of  those brave black children........fifty years later I watched a black president dance with his beautiful black First Lady at the inaugeral ball.

I've seen  the Second Wave of feminism, marched for women's rights, and later joined the emergence of a spiritual paradigm devoted to the  Goddess and Eco-feminism.  I've seen the development of ecology.  And gay rights.  On another black and white TV I've seen a man walk on the moon.  I've watched computers appear  in offices, and then  into the common market,  and just when it became possible to actually own one of the amazing  things, I watched the Internet appear to  change the world and human culture with stunning rapidity. Now people walk around with them in their pockets, and think nothing of calling someone instantaneusly on the other side of the world.

I don't know if the New Age we so fervently believed in in the 70's will include the arising of Atlantis  and a global Golden Age,  but I do sometimes think we might have the beginning of a technology for  it, if humanity can survive its self-destructive adolescence.   If we can survive human greed and violence, if we can find a "Webbed Vision".
  
I remember reading in 1994 Al Gore's EARTH IN THE BALANCE (and what a different America I believe it would have been if Gore had rightfully been President. ). 

Later, when  a movie was made about Al Gore's work to wake up America to climate crisis,  AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH..........I thought, YES!  Now things will change, now the real priority will take precedence.   It's been over  ten years since AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, and in 2017 Gore released AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL as followup.   It did not do well in the movie theatres, being, no doubt, not very "entertaining".   In particular, AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL documented what an extraordinary international  achievement it was to create the Paris Accord on Climate Change. 

Now, thanks to Trump and our supposed elected Congress,  the U.S.A. was withdrawn from the Paris Accord, and  is the only country in the world that is not a member of the Paris Accord.  Is this really what the American people want?  To destroy the future to give short term profit to a few corporate entities?  But this is not what the presidential candidates are speaking about even now as another election looms for next year. This is not what our "elected representatives" in Congress are speaking about either.  And our "president" likes to joke about how funny global warming is (along with making jokes about handicapped people and assaulting women's genitals.)  Ha ha.  There goes the population of Zimbabwe to drought!  There goes Puerto Rico to hurricanes!  There goes Florida to the rising ocean!  Ha ha ha!

But Climate Change  is what scientists are speaking about.

As I write there is a record heatwave killing thousands in India, and in June it was 115 in Paris.  As I write there is no water in the capital city of Zimbabwe for some two million people.   Here it is, accelarating  between the cracks of our so-busy lives. Streaming away on Facebook between the cat videos and the latest warning of what not to eat because it will make you obese or give you cancer. Looming like a shadow over the kids sitting lost over their cellphones on the bus.   As I enjoy movies at the touch of a fingertip, or explore the greatest library the world has ever known, which is literally at the touch of a fingertip.  As I plan a trip to the other side of the continent, a trip that will take me a day, and took my great grandmother a month and my great-great-great-great  Grandfather 6 months, and at the risk of his life. 

Or as I buy  a magazine, found ironically at the checkout counter (see above), next to the latest about Bruce Jenner's sex change or Brad and Angie's marriage problems.  "Places to see before they're gone".    At the checkout counter.......no pun intended.

The end of the world.   Right there at the Check Out Counter.

Not the end of Gaia, Her evolution and experiments, which for all our cleverness and all the gods we've invented and called upon......includes us.  Probably not the end of humanity either, although there will surely be a lot less humans on the planet in 100 years.  But surely the end of so much, so many other species, so many beautiful places, so many lives that will never fulfill their promise.  Our magnificent civilization,  our expanding, insatiable, unsustainable,  global civilization, in its infancy, really.   

Today, as on other days, I ask myself how do you deal with that?  Maybe tomorrow I'll have an answer for myself, but today, I don't know.  

It’s 3:23 in the morning and I’m awake… 

because my great great grand children won’t let me sleep.

My great great grandchildren ask me in dreams:  What did you do?

(Excerpts from Hieroglyphic Stairway,  by Drew Dellinger)

I used to feel self-rightous when I pulled out my shopping bag, or recycled my paper, I would sneer at people in SUV's, feeling "appropriate" in my little mini car.  But now.....I don't.  We're all in this together  and the world my grandson will inherit, and all of those yet to come............will have to know it so much more than I.  

How do we live with this?  What do we do, in our small and daily lives?  Where is the wailing wall, the support groups, the encounter groups, the consciousness raising groups, the "sitting Shiva", the "climate change meditation rooms"......that might bring about dialogue, that could shake us out of our denial, our complacency?  If two movies by a former Vice President of the United States, and 98% of the worlds scientists, won't do it.........what? 

"A Webbed Vision" (2007)

Many people vividly recall from childhood unexpected moments of perceiving the grand unity.  Some experience the grace of inter-being on extended trips into the deep silence of wilderness. Some know a version of it in the post orgasmic state.  Some have reported that such "altered" consciousness occurs suddenly in mundane circumstances.  It seems to persist even through our deeply ingrained habits of seeing only separateness and fragmentation.

Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace:  The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age

I can cast no judgement on others, or myself, for needing to turn away,  for needing to make my plans, plant my gardens.  I do believe, as Charlene Spretnak comments above, a "Webbed Vision" of interdependancy is the paradigm that just might save us all.  But this is not an essay in which I can somehow conclude with any hopeful closure or self-help cliche.  Yes, we all should be getting solar panels, recycling our gray water, eliminating plastic waste, driving the smallest cars we can get.........but we are all still part of the problem.   Perhaps the only place to begin, each day, is a spiritual place.   The point in the center of the mandala, remembering that we are each a part of the Living Earth  and each other.  From that place proceed with the day...............

"Racing to the Precipice" - Noam Chomsky

Not easy to listen to, but brilliant observation of where we may be heading, by one of America's most significant intellectuals. These days I am unable to separate the political from the personal, or for that matter, from the spiritual. They are all interconnected.

https://youtu.be/rrPmvMqwt3k

Before the Flood - Movie by Leonard Dicaprio and National Geographic

This is so important. It says it all, so clearly.

 
https://youtu.be/D9xFFyUOpXo

Too Brilliant, too true, and too funny Australian Look at Corporate Ethics..............

On the eve of the TPP passing and all those suits with pens signing away the future for more unlimited greed,  slave labor in China and Bangladesh, and disposible plastic gee gaws and "instant fashion" for us, this marvelous satire of the coal industry's executives in Australia is true of more than just that country.

https://youtu.be/tqXzAUaTUSc




***and, well, I couldn't help but throw in John Oliver as a Post Script.

Vicki Noble and "the Cassandra complex"

 

I belong to a group that includes teacher, shaman and artist Vicki Noble, who, along with Karen Vogel, created the Motherpeace Tarot.  She is also the author of numerous books, was the editor of UNCOILING THE SNAKE - Ancient Patterns in Contemporary Women's Lives, was a key presenter at the Goddess Conference I attended in 2011 in Glastonbury, and is on the faculty of the Women's Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

With the U.N. Conference on Climate change going on, and the article by Chris Hedges I shared in the previous post, I've been feeling overwhelmed and despairing.  Vicki kindly let me share her comments in response to the article, and my own questions.  I find what she said so helpful.  In the final analysis, all we can really do is ease the suffering, in small ways or great, and that suffering has to include ourselves.    Thank you, Vicki, for many years of dedication and inspiration for  so many, for your dedication to the return of the Goddess.

"I heard something about this (new statistics on climate change)  on NPR last week, and  the part about the anticipated temperature rise. It was so shocking, I thought I hadn’t heard it correctly, especially since there was no analysis or discussion at all, just a passing mention of the 3+ degree rise, and then on to the next item. It’s like a dream I also had last week, in which our whole population was standing at a “fiscal cliff” (I so hate that expression) waiting for an approaching tsunami, as if we were watching a movie. And so it does seem as if we are in a kind of trance state, waiting for the end of the world. (Paralyzed? Disembodied? Stupefied?)

Do you know that they have a medical name for what’s wrong with people like us who keep talking about these frightening possibilities, the inevitable consequences of our actions? It’s called the “Cassandra Complex.” I’ve got it for sure. You know, Cassandra of Troy, the priestess (“seer”) who saw what was coming and tried to warn the inhabitants of her city to no avail; she went crazy with the effort of holding her sight in the face of total denial. At least we’re talking to each other here—a helpful reality check—and taking whatever small steps we can in the direction of awareness, preparation, and change.

It’s a Full Moon Lunar Eclipse tonight, as the Mystery continues to unfold.  
 
In 1999 I left Berkeley after two decades, to move up into the redwoods near Santa Cruz, where I lived in a small cabin chopping wood and building fires in my wood stove, while I pondered the state of my global despair. I thought at the time that surely I am not the only activist left from the 1970s who thought we were going to change things more dramatically—and we didn’t. It was a crushing disappointment for me at the time and I suppose in all honesty, it still is—although I do my best to maintain peacefulness, rather than constant adrenaline. But when Monsanto makes some new inroad into killing off life on the planet, I am once again thrown into a dark mood.

The spiritual practices that I developed while up in those mountains—invocations to the Tibetan Dakinis of the four cardinal directions and the center—have become a mainstay of my current teachings, and at some point I received an answer to my fervent question of, "What should I be doing???"  The loving and very direct response to my question was: "There is nothing to do but alleviate suffering."  So I agreed to do that and came down from the mountains to teach and engage again. Just trying to stay present in the unflinching reality of Cassandra and the priestesses and prophetesses everywhere. Feminist activist spirituality, blessed be!"

 I felt like sharing another piece of guidance that helps me as well.  I received this many years ago (in 1992 actually) and it also seems timely........I keep the little picture below (that's pretty much its actual size) in a frame on my altar.  Of all the icons and magical objects I've collected over the years, it's one of my most important.

 In the fall of 1992 I was working on my own Tarot deck.  I went to a copy shop to make copies of some of the small paintings I had done for the series, among them my version of the "Hermit" card, which I called "Solitude".  It's actually a self portrait, and what the card means to me has to do with the journey of the soul through the darkness of ignorance, pain, confusion, and sometimes the "dark night of the soul".  When we find the light, kindle the flame, that illuminates the way we emerge from the darkness.  Very often this is a solitary journey.   But to simply illuminate the way for ourselves is not enough - having kindled a flame, I believe it's important to share what has been learned.  Perhaps the light we share, the warmth of the flame we contribute, can illuminate the path of another.  We are all pathfinders, and part of the journey is to share what has been learned along the way to  encourage others.   Even in the darkest nights.  What else, ultimately, is there to do?

Color copiers in 1992 were not as advanced as they are now, they often broke down, and copies were a lot more expensive.  So I wasn't surprised when the machine didn't do anything for a few minutes when I was copying this painting.  Finally it spit out a big piece of paper with only a tiny image in the center - the one above.  I called over the technician, who fiddled with the machine, and I finally got my copies.  It wasn't until I got home that I looked at the "mistake" and realized how extraordinary it was that of all things to focus in on, the machine had focused perfectly on the hand bearing a light.

We do get guidance, truly.  I do not know if I have always been true to this gift of guidance, but I never am without my little xerox "mistake", to remind me.

Blessed be.  May we all "bear a light", no matter how difficult.  What else can we do? 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
**The Motherpeace Round Tarot by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel was one of the first feminine, Goddess-oriented decks, designed to celebrate the Great Mother and Her peaceful, life-loving creatures. It was self-published in 1981 in Berkeley, California and later released in a U. S. Games version in 1984. Like the cyclical ways of nature, the round cards can take on many positions in a reading beyond the usual two choices - upright and reversed.