Paul Kingsnorth Warns You

Paul Kingsnorth wants to warn you about Neogreens who Could Destroy Nature in the name of the Environment.  In case you are the sort of greenie or environmentalist who:

1. is stuck in the past, and/or
2. is following the money, and/or
3. was born yesterday, and/or
4. doesn't know much.

This is Paul Kingsnorth's greatest article since I noticed him.  It is timely.  It is overdue.  There are too many armchair and activist environmentalists  whom are still bogged down in everybody else's Carbon Footprints.  They had forgotten Nature, and while they lost sight of it, more of it was turned over to the bidding of Mankind. 

What has made Paul a king's thorn in the backside of the Green world is that he believes it probably is too late to avert man-made climate change.   I agree with his strategy - the strategy he calls "withdrawal".  The juggernaut of the Global Human Economic Machine grows forever larger, whether or not it does so boldly or with the sinister silence of stealth technology.  Withdrawal from trying to halt a juggernaut is just as effective as throwing pebbles at it, which is what most greenie environmentalists have been doing for years.  Withdraw.   Sing, laugh and play, and actively engage in the restoration of nature.  It does not matter if economists (whom are torpid useless blobs incapable even of accountancy jobs) criticise Paul Kingsnorth as the leader of the Neopeasantry, as did Tim Worstall.   These criticisms have moved onto Twitter, and the ridiculous argument is as follows:

Tim Worstall ‏@worstall

@paulkingsnorth I've done hard physical labour. That's why I hate it and am glad that so few others have to do it. Roll on mechanisation!

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4 AugPaul Kingsnorth ‏@paulkingsnorth

@worstall It's been rolling on for two hundred years. That's why we're fucked. Still. I'm sure technology will save us, eh?

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4 AugTim Worstall ‏@worstall

@paulkingsnorth What? You're serious? You're against mechanisation? Everything must be sweat of the brow? You actually mad or what?

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5 AugPaul Kingsnorth ‏@paulkingsnorth

@worstall But it can't have escaped even your attention that industrialisation has led directly to mass extinction and climate change.

It is bad enough that we have blogging, and television, and radio, and newspapers.   The Global Human Economic Machine (GHEM) is now bogged down in piecemeal dialogues enabled by Twitter.  When even Monty Don, bless his huge hands, has had to launch a digital entity to protect and enhance his public personality, the pervasiveness of instant yet time-wasting digital communications has to be considered total.

Because of the wetness and bad weather brought on by climate change, there have been few days this summer to hear the birds tweet, but the noise on Twitter has grown louder.  There have been so few days suitable for insect flying, that bees and less popular insects are well below their usual numbers.   When the sun has come out, so too have all of mankind, in its usual rush to show that it deserves to keep its job/contract, or to pander to the status system of suburban society.  Yes, they have been mowing, strimming, hedge and bush cutting in every rare and precious moment when the weather was dry enough for bees to fly. I hate suburbanization.   All the world will one day be a contiguous suburb, as barren as the one I know now.   And all we have is Twitter to save us from a desert landscape worthy of a Jewish cemetery.

There is a contradiction of being a neo-Luddite.  You have to embrace peasant technology such as scything, while maintaining excellence in GHEM high technology, whether it be in global communications, pharmacology, or genetic manipulation.  It is obviously an uncomfortably broad spectrum of technology to master, but one where genius is essential.  This is not anything that you will learn from the Olympics, now at the crowing and crowning peak of its medalling glorifications.   Like the Roman peasants whom used to watch the gladiatorial games, a modern Olympic peasant does not understand his or her future, let alone the planet's future.

Another Dry Spring, Another Drought in Britain

So everyone knows there is a drought in the South-East of Britain. It gets more and more common, although this year they are expecting the worst one since 1976. A hose pipe ban will be coming in soon in most areas, and there is no sign of rain for a long time, which is very obvious if you study the surface pressure forecast maps. The low-pressure, wet weather systems that normally pass through Britain and the Netherlands at this time of year are whizzing over Iceland instead. This means the Arctic gets more warmth and rain, and the Arctic warming and melting is speeding up.

What gets me are the increasing frequency of dry spring seasons. The saying, April showers bring May flowers has so quickly become meaningless. Last year, March AND April were so horribly dry, that farms and people planting seeds in spring had to worry, worry, worry. Then May was full of rain. Seeing that the seasons are different, it still bothers me even though I understand what is happening. Memories of more normal seasons sit there, feeling uneasy when they are not reassured by what they see. In spring this matters the most, because spring is the season that we look forward to while surviving through the dull, dark, depressing, grey winters.

Nobody bangs on about climate change any more. Five years ago, they were shouting about climate disasters. Of course, you assume that when a disaster happens, it appears suddenly, say within a year or two. What we forget is that a disaster can take 30 years to gradually happen. Is it a disaster when it takes so long to unfold? For human beings, whom already have all the knowledge and power they need to control their environment and seize ever more land and sea to bring under their control, 30 years is not a disaster. We are in a disaster now, but the disaster is for other living things, not for human beings.  Human beings are adapting, by stealing ever more of the planet from other living things.   So the selfish humanists do not worry too much about climate change, if they have enough time to adapt things for human beings. This is sad, but true. When something is true, and all you can do is be sad, then you might as well write about it, for the benefit of posterity?  Or you can have a funeral, in your mind, for all the living things that will lose out to human beings during their climate disaster.

Greenpeace Population Contraception on First Day of Spring

Today is the first day of Spring. (The Winter Solstice is Midwinter's Day, and the Spring Equinox is the Middle of Spring. This was all explained years ago in The Definition of Summer. Seasons are rigorously defined by the length of day, whereas even the UK Met Office "arbitrarily" defines a season by choosing Julian calendar dates 1 December, 1 March, 1 July, and 1 October.)

It is grey. At least it is warm. Yesterday the temperature went up to 12 degrees here in London. I'm not freezing any more, and the dark winter days are resolutely longer. Yet here I am, blogging.

Distraction is the key to procrastination, which is the coward's solution to facing challenges.

So in praise of cowardice, Greenpeace as a gratuitous thought-link came up. Global Over-population has not been a priority for Environmentalists, because they choose their priorities in the same way as I do. When faced with a challenge, the coward's solution is to procrastinate by distracting itself with Easy Income Earners.

So Global Warming/Climate Change was an Easy Income Earner, but as this blog has long held, it is not the primary problem facing the planet. Humanity and the natural history of its evolution to ever higher populations, and the consequent effects on itself are the primary problem.

Introduce cheap effective contraceptives as was done in the Sixties, and what happens? The people who didn't want to have children, haven't had any children. The people who didn't mind having children, had children.

It does not logically follow that the people who don't mind having children are always the best people to have children. Similarly, some of the people who didn't want to have children, might have turned out to be better parents.

Nor does it follow logically that the introduction of contraceptives leads to a net decline in population.

The population will eventually ramp up again because the people who don't mind having children, have children who don't mind having children. They will just ignore the contraceptives.

Indeed, all this has happened before, because prior to the creation of chemical contraceptives in the Twentieth Century, Religions and Cultures were created as sociological contraceptives.

That is why Managed global population control, such as has been pioneered by China with their One-Child policy, is a necessary and desirable solution. Because even if every square inch of this planet were cultivated with GM crops and every pest had been eradicated from the planet (just as smallpox was eradicated), we would arrive at having tens of billions (say for example 40,000,000,000, 5 times what we have today) people subsisting at the standards of the Dalit in India and the work-slaves of China, and the starving in Africa.

At that stage, you would be better off being stuck in a life-suspension pod wired up to a computer just like in The Matrix.

Wealth, Money and Planetary Ecosystem Economics

The recent Global Economic Hiccups of Financial Armageddon gave environmentalists their first real feeling of clawback in decades. Official human economic activity and consumption actually fell since last summer. A machete taken to the Global Financial System had more effect on mankind's carbon footprint than all the moralizing campaigns beseeching suburban housewives to use low-energy light-bulbs.

But oil prices collapsed last summer, and have stayed down. Nobody can be fooled into believing that the Global Human Economic Machine is defeated. The GHEM only choked on the ill-conceived biofuel mixture in its fuel lines. The GHEM is intact, still thriving, and without any designed alternatives.

Yes, in the continuing Age of Stupid, with the intellectual failure of academic economists now widely exposed and publicised, I notice the media are once again reminding us that the planet is staring into an environmental abyss. Today it is that the Amazon will become a local positive feedback process of ecosystem dieback from global temperature rises. (If you don't know what a "positive feedback process" is, count yourself lucky that you have lived in a bland and very controlled era, so go away and wake up before a Tim Kretschmer clone goes berserk in your neighbourhood! The Amazon is a very fragile ecosystem, and that's all you have to know.) Any number of scientists and academics are dancing around naked, waving their credentials, their scientific models, and their careful research, to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of the Amazon ecosystem. All these scientists are no more effective than the media that publicise their findings, aren't they? They are learned, intelligent, but they do not applythese two words: Carpe Diem.

Carpe Diem: Seize the Day. What use is a scientist if he/she predicts catastrophe, then stands by to analyse its progress without making any effort to halt it? What use are scientists, collectively, if they cannot seize control and prevent catastrophe?

So oil prices are low again. Too low. Carbon Economics is as yet the only notion so far driven into the thick skulls of our political Talking Heads. What to do?

Firstly, it is essential that oil prices should be driven sky high again. Secondly, scientists all over the world should be inserting Planetary Ecosystem Economics in place of either Finance, Politics, and Economics. Planetary Ecosystem Economics does not just get stuck on the gases of the element of Carbon. It takes into account all things in the Planetary Ecosystem, eg. water, light, space, habitat, air, salinity, alkalinity, species rarity. It accounts for the impact of humanity, and it costs all the effects of human economic activity. P.E.E. places a value on all things in the Planetary Ecosystem, not just those which are tritely recognized as essential for human consumption, comfort, or multiplication. Money is an essential currency for accounting in P.E.E, but unlike in ordinary Economics, values and wealth are not left to be established by markets of delusional people catering to their mass selfish wants. Values and wealth are established by specialists trained to view mankind as short-term guests of the planetary biological and physical resources. How are these values set? Now you're thinking.... They don't teach this at the London School of Economics, do they? Of course not... They who teach, cannot think original thoughts? Just see how long they were stuck on the ideas of communism!

The Age of Stupid

Nice banner on this website for this EcoGreen Movie...you can fly in a metal machine from the CN Tower, over smoking powerstations to the Petronas Towers. Through all the Globalist City towers, can you identify the others?

The Age of Stupid has nothing to do with Plane Stupid, which was recently famous again for smudging the Champagne Socialism on Peter Mandelson's face. It appears to be a populist film. An Inconvenient Truth, which I never bothered to see because I knew it all was not populist enough, and because of Al Gore, it was hardly apartisan. Maybe this film is intended to plug the gap, the way films about Nuclear Holocaust succeeded in motivating the decline of the Cold War?

It is of course well known that the Age of Stupidity had its beginnings in the Industrial Revolution in England in the 1700s, although it quickly spread thorughout Europe, the Americas, and the rest of the world. The measure of stupidity has been graphed by historians, and the Peak of this graph is arbitrarily somewhere between 1950 to 2008. Peaks don't matter if you're on a high-up plateau that has a few molehills! Stupidity, I expect, has been quantified as an aggregation of several parameters, primarily of course : 1) Quantity of devastation to Planetary Ecosystem Habitats. 2) Deliberate ignorance of available knowledge and failure. 3) Failure to identify and address the deleterious ecosystem effects of new forms of human economic activity. What other measure would be properly scientific? The Nobel Prize is no measure of scientific quality, and my qualitative science is as good as any current social science.

Well, for the price of a British Bank, especialy the part-Scottish banks, how many carrots and peas could you buy? Oh yes, Lloyds Halifax Bank of Scotland has become the second Royal Bank of Scotland Natwest Algemene Bank Nederland. It is owned by the British Government. For the price of a British bank, how many peanuts could you buy? If the price of a British bank is beyond your imagination, why not think about the price of an education in a "Developed Nation". Wonder how many carrots and peas can the average person in a developed nation grow by themeselves?

The British Government now owns majority shareholdings in half of its commercial banks. Mervyn King and the Bank of England has taken so long to explain Quantitative Easing, you would think it was nuclear physics, and at last it will be introduced. (Although in nuclear physics, nuclear bombs were tested in a controlled conditions, even if they never took into consideration Environmental effects). So UK Gilt prices have risen, and interest rates are tending to zero. Whoopee, for the wasteful Labour Government economic policy?

Meanwhile all this time, the European Central Bank has already been providing unlimited liquidity to its Member Nations, (as if we didn't guess), so has effectively been doing a sort of quantitative easing. Indeed, since the ECB has to play politics between supporting the Government Bonds of more than a dozen nations, it doesn't even have the simple economic system that the UK monetary system presents. (You can see why people will pay to read the Financial Times, whereas the Economist magazine is nothing but a propagandist tool used to destroy alternative economies that already existed all around the planet. Globalist Hegemony has of course been over-shadowed by Global Hedge Money.)

I can't decide. Is it worth saving some Economists, and retraining them to PEE (Planetary Ecosystem Economics)? Or should all pre-2009 economists be sent to landfill? New Ecosystem Economists can be designed, and a large factory can be set up somewhere on the planet, where they will be manufactured more cheaply due to economies of scale, and rapidly shipped around the planet and dumped cheaply on existing Human Ecosystems. It would be the quickest way of ensuring that the Global Human Economic Machine will never again arise. Oh Asimov would be laughing!

Planetary Ecosystem Economics

I have not had one grape off my vine this year; what little crop was coming after the awful summer, has been denuded by birds in the last three weeks. The evidence of blue/purple bird shit underneath the vine is damning.

I had been wondering which birds were doing this. In past years I've seen the blackbirds go for it, but not so assiduously. So today, when in the deluge of rain we are having, my local robin popped in to perch on the grapevine, to survey the food, I was faced with the human quandary.

The robin has been a constant visitor this year, you see, and has been my confirmation that my organic garden feeds nature and wildlife, naturally.

The human quandary is based on this: how can humanity feed itself, without taking food away from other living things?

If I had to depend on that grapevine for my food, that robin would have been soup months ago. As with many nature lovers, I would rather delude myself that I am making a difference: somewhere else, a farmer is growing food chemically and mechanically on my behalf and denying it from the robins, yet I am trying to grow food and letting the robins eat my food.

Perverse? Perhaps. But then, I can console myself that most people in London are not nature lovers, and so I am creating diversity of opportunity for robins: just as some farmers will still protect their strips of nature now that set-aside payments have been withdrawn.

Nonetheless, I am peeved that I have not been left with one grape! And the lesson is this: despite the stubborn ignorance of anti-Malthusians, the fact is that a planetary ecosystem will never support an unlimited population of human beings, without substantial eradication, near-extinction, and absolute extinction of most other forms of life.

Food for humans takes away food for something else, and to allow humanity to proceed in deliberate ignorance of the value of other living things, is to be accessory to speciocide. For example, who are we to decide that a slug is an unnecesary and undesirable form of life compared to a lettuce, when in fact the slug is a juicy meal to a hedgehog, a bird, and even a fox?

Which brings me back once again to the Global Human Economic Machine, which is the Juggernaut composite of global human civilization and globalized human technology. It grows with inexorable, deliberate ignorance, and even in this era of Global Financial Collapse, there are NO economists who give any space to Planetary Ecosystem Economics.

The futulity of my endeavour to expand consideration of Planetary Ecosystem Economics, or at least to evaluate and question the Global Human Economic Machine, has landed me in despair many times this year. Despair will always be available. Let this be my record of persistence despite despair.

E On F Off, Down with Brown, Up with Green

The trouble with getting excited about the recent jury trial court victory is precisely what I blogged about 6 weeks ago.

If you're the Gordon Brown Labour government, a bunch of anarchists winning this precedent-setting case can one way or another be turned instantly to your advantage. Politics is chess, and some people can look 10 moves ahead and have a strategy. Winning a pawn is not proof you are winning the game.

Already, the media, the intellectuals, and I are all bowed towards the inevitability of nuclear power stations, simply because Britain out of national security needs to maintain its Nuclear technological base, even if it does not pursue a massive program of nuclear power generation.

Meanwhile, this week the Brown government announced a "fuel-poverty" policy that has the correct intent, but is nothing different than what existed before. Lag your loft, pump your cavity walls with insulation, but keep your Central Heating on at 21 degrees, while you sit there in front of the telly like a battery human, being fed the food produced by machines, and barely ever producing energy out of it.

Nobody in politics is re-designing cities or social groupings, let alone the national economy. 12 years of a pseudo-socialist government, and all we have is a bunch of politicians who want to carry on driving to Tesco on a wretched motorway, and sitting at home alone in 21 degrees centigrade through summer and winter, until the time comes to rot in a nursing home at £800 per week.

Christian Socialists? Are they really that stupid?

Open Source Food versus Genetically Modified Rapeseed of Monsanto

So Percy Schmeiser was the man who had to stand up alone against a Globalist Corporation.

In Britain, Rape is commonly grown as an oilseed crop. In Canada, because of prudish reactions to the other meanings of the word rape, the plant was given the name Canola long ago.

Monsanto developed a GM version of rape/canola that was resistant to their Roundup herbicide:

1. Buy the herbicide made by Monsanto
2. Buy the seed resistant to that herbicide grown by Monsanto
3. Spray the herbicide on the field several times a year to superficially keep down the other weeds and non-GM seed.
4. Pay a license for it year after year, because you never own the seed or its descendents, not unless Monsanto dies.

It sounds like Monopoly, because it is. There is one player, called Monsanto, and it owns the whole board. As if that isn't bad enough:

5. Get sued by Monsanto if their seed lands on your fields, and you don't want to grow their crap as a crop.

Quite apart from this obvious abuse of corporate power, there is a fundamental insult here to all people who believe in Open Source. The definition of a seed, or any genetic material, as intellectual property goes entirely against everything that Open Source advocates believe in.

GM = Genetically Modified = Globalist Monopoly

How many Open Source computer heads who defend GM Science ever think about this, every time they eat something? That the food they eat, which today often contains GM soya, goes against their political beliefs?

Well a Google on Open Source GM reveals that the concept of Open Source Genomics is a few years old, and the article points out that Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) biotechnology should be favoured over Transgenic GM creations.

So why, when Prince Charles spoke up last month against GM, did I not hear any of his opponents mention MAS biotechnology?

Silence is Golden for those who are protecting the Golden Eggs laid by the Transgenic GM Geese.

Open Source versus GM. I like it. I wonder where all that GM Canola Rapeseed oil goes to. How can we avoid it? Stuff it down the throats of stupid Labour Governments, maybe?

Double Fig - Siamese Syconiums

What we have here is a freak fig that was developing on my dwarf fig tree Ficus Carica that produces edible seedless figs. One fig is growing out of another fig, Or according to the website Wayne's Word, linked, one syconium is growing out of another the ostiole of another syconium.
This is intended to be a rude post, but self-penetrating figs? The things they get up to when there aren't any wasps to get up their ostioles! Nature finds its own Perversity.

Dow Agro Herbicide in Contaminated Horse Manure

Forefront, the name for Aminopyralid has caused Dow Agrosciences a lot of trouble this year.

The amazing thing is, if it weren't for organic farmers and allotment growers, the whole thing would have not come to light as quickly as it did.

Agroscience. The name is enough to bring on an attack of Global Human Economic Machinitis. What faith can one have in science, when global companies who market herbicides hide behind the name of science in their job of making a profit? Even scientists can rarely hide behind science. The true scientist must always doubt his findings and leave them open to active scrutiny. The true scientist must also alert everyone to the limitations of his findings and his knowledge.

Common sense dictates that new science is untried, untested, and hence should be the most untrustworthy, and subjected to ruthless trials. Here was just one example this year of the limitations of trialling in the agricultural environment. And there are examples every year, and there will be more examples, every year. For such is the role of the scientist in the Global Human Economic Machine (GHEM). The scientist is just a particularly insular and ignorant form of cog in the GHEM. One who performs his job without asking embarrassing questions, then conveniently dies without ever venturing beyond his field (the field in which he is only a serf, not even a tenant).

There are other cogs, who go about sabotaging websites that advertise the embarrassing truth that the scientists didn't reveal.

The Internal world in the External World of the Globalized Economy

Spirituality is as much of a need as sex, food, mental exercise, work and socializing. Today I caught on Radio 4 a repeat Catholic service by one John O'Donohue that was recorded in March 2001. Note that this was still at the height of the Millenium Economic Boom, just when the Dot Com crash had begun, and before the New York 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.

There is something lost in the transcript which is conveyed in the service, but it is possible to Listen Again for up to a week on Sunday Worship

There is a sublime wildness in God that calls us to risk becoming who we dream and have long been dreamed to be. .... More often that not, the language of religion falsifies the subtlety of Divine Presence and Imagination, and labels and names mislead us into the bland territories of the obvious. Often, when you wake in the middle of the night, unprotected, uncertainty finds you. The role and name you wear during the day, the things you do, what you have achieved, who others hold you to be, all of that seems so far away now. You feel alone, a stranger in the world. Though disturbing, such moments of dangerous knowing draw us deeper into who we really are and why it is that we are here.
..

We can have everything else, friends, achievements, possessions and success, but if we have closed off contact with God, something gnaws at us and the heart can find no contentment. Deep in every heart, this longing is alive. It seems that Hegel and Nietzsche were right. In our times, God has died. Churches are emptying and the public talk about God as clichéd, dead and deadening. There is no excitement in that kind of deity, and deftly the psychology of consumerism has stolen the garments of deity, to present products that awaken, even if only temporarily, the call of desire. We need to find a new concept of God in order to awaken our lives and impassion us again with eternal desire. We need to unearth our submerged longing for the Divine. We have allowed our desire to become cheapened through false satisfactions. We seem to have lost the practice and patience of true desire. Our surface minds are saturated with invitations that lack direction and depth. For too long, we have lingered on the chromatic surfaces, where nothing can root and where experience is reduced to a momentary gleaming. We need to reach deeper and begin to excavate our eternal desire. Without the passion of God, all the proofs and arguments of theology become dry and forced. Perhaps belief, after all, is but a helpless attraction go God, and the saints and mystics are people who simply fall head over heels in love with the divine. We have become weary of Religion telling us how to think and what to do. In a time when culture is trading soul for image, we need to retrieve again a sense of what Keats called ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections’. The deepest thing, after all, in each heart, is the imprint of the divine. The loneliness in us is a loneliness for the tenderness of God, and we should never allow any system or voice to evict us from the embrace of that tenderness.
..

One of the great mysteries of the world is the mystery of difference. No two pains are ever the same. In a landscape, each stone, tree and field are different, but difference doesn’t seem to trouble nature. Each stone dwells in its own shape of stillness. Outside, millions of years pass, but can never enter or intrude on it. For humans, though, difference is always intense. No two faces are ever the same and behind each face there is a hidden world that no one else can see. Each life is a narrative that remains mostly hidden.

This is why it’s so difficult to be human. You live in two worlds, the outer world of name, family, address and role, and the inner world which is profoundly nameless, where no one else can enter, and which remains intimate, though unknown, largely to you, yet so much depends on how you see and understand this amazing, concealed world that you carry around every moment. If you live only in the outside world, your heart will wither in the famine fields of image, information and noise. You will become so weary and worn, struggling on the treadmills of competition, impression and pretence, and you will never learn to be yourself. One of the most noble duties of the human being is to learn the art of individuality.

The Irish word ‘ushla’ [?] captures this. It evokes the coherence, dignity and rhythm of being at one with your own nature. This finds classical expression, for instance, in the confessions of St. Patrick, where we see his ‘ushla anima’, his nobility of soul, a life of critical and creative presence always at the threshold of risk.

Each one of us is completely individual. No one else sees the world like you do. No one else feels pains like you do. No one else has the view from where you stand, and no other carries the memories and gifts and wounds that you do. You were sent to the Earth to learn to be yourself, to see and recognise the miracle of your own individuality. Something is coming alive in you that can be found nowhere else, and the Divine Artist exercised huge care in creating you. For thousands of years before you came here, you were prepared, you were dreamed and imagined, who you would be, when you would come here, where you would arrive, to whom, and all the drama and depth of narrative that would emerge as your life.

Immense care went into shaping all the events and experiences that unfold naturally as your daily life. Nothing is accidental and when you forget yourself, neglect or deny who you are, or desperately try to ignore your soul, you disrespect the gift that was so tenderly and lovingly prepared for you. When you negate yourself, you diminish the divine, and when you awaken your life and inhabit the sacrament of your own individuality, you enter divine presence. The mystery of your individuality was given to you not merely for yourself, but as a gift to awaken divine presence wherever you go. To be the individual that you were dreamed to be is often a hard and lonely path to travel. Though there is shelter in sameness and predictability, there is no growth or peace in a denied life.

There is a bit of genius here that rises above the mundane doctrines and machinations of the Christian Churches. Nonetheless, although he recognizes that we have to find a new concept of God, he is forced to use the word God endlessly to express his criticism of a soulless materialist life.

Note also that he also resorts to implying that an individual is on this earth by DESIGN, which is one of the ingenious psychological devices used by human beings, and taught by the Catholic Church, to insulate the internal spiritual world from the external real world. To believe that you arrived and exist by design automatically bestows upon you:

- a sense of purpose and direction
- an omnipresent sense of supervised guidance.

There is no doubt in my soul that we all need spirituality, but if we are to be individuals, then we should not want to be sheep with the wool pulled over our eyes. Specialists at the Internal World, in a Global Economy, should beware how they are used to serve the Global Human Machine.

There is at least one new concept of God, mine, or this blog would never have come into existence. It is harder to get words shorter than three letters in English, but the shortest word of all is one with no letters. When I say that there is Love and the Planet, then there is my internal world, and my external world both in the very title of this blog.

He said to His disciples: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or about your body, what you will wear, for life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens. They neither sew nor reap. They have neither storehouse nor barn and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds, and can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

You see that Christianity dwells on teachings from a time when Nature was so abundant that there was no prospect of Man ever dominating it as completely as today. God does not feed the ravens very much any more, for Man has been killing the Planet while also killing God. Anyone who cannot see that the Planet must be protected, must foolishly believe in Divine Providence. Divine Providence did not build the Ark that saved all living things. Divine Providence made floods, and famines. Divine Providence is an extravagant belief that can only be indulged in by well-fed poets. Spirituality does not need to be associated with such extravagance.

Nonetheless, there is a deep need for spirituality such as John O'Donohue expresses. The Churches and those who think they are Christian, should begin to update themselves so that they can address the world that exists today. They should not rely on applying their speciality for the internal world on those people who arrive at infirmity, old age, and death's door. There is a need in the vast population, and that need must be served, or its perversion will continue to destroy the whole Planet.

Protest against Coal Fired Power Stations in Britain

Yesterday, I saw some of the Climate Campers cycling through London with their trailers, down to the protest camp in Kingsnorth.

For a while, some people thought that you could release useful energy from coal without releasing Carbon gases into the atmosphere. Sustainability, entropy, organics, or even chemistry, please?

Britain is still going ahead with building a new coal-fired power plant in Kent. When EON, the world's largest investor-owned power and gas company is the contractor, you have to automatically ask who is supposed to control Humanity in a globalized economy?

It makes a lovely (laugh) example for how democracy in Britain should be questioned for its faults, and not made complacent just because it is supposed to be superior to the evolving political systems in places like China and Pakistan.

Protest is supposed to be an essential feature of democratic freedom. The protesters of Western democracy today seem to be sweet young things, not the angry young men of yestercentury.

How successful will their protest be? Will they be ignored completely? Will they be given a "win", just as coal prices are soaring because even China has to shut down its power plants because of a coal shortage?

Will political strategists plot a democratic show with the lovely young green dreamers swaying the shrivelled hearts of the government into changing their minds? With gas bills rising, the fat slobs in cars going to shop at Tesco can moan at green moralists. The lovely green protesters will go away feeling unloved, hungry and impoverished for the thankless task. Six months later, we could see the British Government commissioning a nuclear power plant at Kingsnorth instead.

Either way, EON will have high-technology engineering contracts for German companies, that will hone even more power plants to sell into the Global Economy.

So Germans, under the cover of the European Union, despite having lost two World Wars and losing all desire to have babies will nonetheless be perpetuating the soulless technological industrialization that gave us Marx and Communism, except that the technology is now so advanced it depends on machines more than men.

Will our spiritual leaders ever consider the fundamental features of European Protestant heritage that have put Humanity on this soulless road? Could they slow it down, let alone stop and reverse it? Or will they sit in their day dreams of moral holiness, fed fat on the wealth of Tractors, Fertilisers and Pesticides, consoling their weakness with their belief in God?

All the while, the sexless Economists will be steadfast in their globalist economic mission, by earning fat salaries for merely marketing Growth and Wealth, but not for a minute considering where it must all end.

Join the dance, Stay in the trance, or Love the Planet?

IUCN Species Survival Group

There is a United Nations for one species of 7 billion people, who show no sign of becoming extinct.

There is also an IUCN for all the other millions of species, many of which are becoming extinct because mankind drives them out by taking up most of the food, space and water, and leaving behind poisons, pollutions, and people.

The annual budget of the IUCN is very small. Less than half a billion dollars. Even London's annual budget controlled by the Mayor is 9 billion bounds.

That's how much humanity cares about Living Things. Human beings are common, and caring for humanity is so common that even people who love dogs and horses only love them because they project human personalities upon them.

For a laugh, from Why don't you Blog?

Obviously, for creationists it’s a simple matter to solve. Just pray loads to the big guy to create another few thousand species. That’s bound to work. And anyway, humans are above the animal kingdom aren’t they so we probably don’t depend on biodiversity to survive. Etc.

A Soggy Wet Day in a soggy week in a Messed up Year of Weather

What a soggy, soggy day! Once upon a time, if I saw someone cycling in this rain, I would have thought them simply mad, or just plain stupid. Yet here I've been, into town and back, through the unrelenting rain. So soaked that I had to stop to drain my shoes and wring my socks out half way.

At least it was warm. The last time I biked this much in such wet weather was in cold stormy winds in December.

This week has been wet, wet, wet. Aside from a bit of rain at the end of May, it has been relatively dry since April, with some 2 week stretches of scorching drought.

The weather has been perfect for the raspberries, which have been blasting away for over 4 weeks, but are now near their end. I have eaten so many raspberries every day that I don't mind a break! The variety I have, Glen Moy, sometimes crops a second time in September/October, and it looks like if it stays warm with enough sunshine, that shall happen again this year.

But the disaster has been the plums. The local yellow plum has failed miserably because of the warm February, followed by a cold March and April, with the heavy snowfall on April 6. What flowering there was started in February, but never got pollinated, because there weren't enough bees around, and what did get pollinated seems to have fallen off from the snow and cold that followed. So this year I will be having less than 10% of the amount of plums I had last year.

Climate change? There is no way that Genetically Modified Anything could ever be designed to cope for this degree of unpredictability in the weather. It takes a few years to design and distribute any new variety of food crop. With weather as changeable as this, the only 100% reliable form of agriculture is to grow mixed pasture and graze animals on it. Just when the global food shortage is telling us to eat less meat, especially pork and chicken, as these are fed on grain stocks.

Other gardening events. I slashed my kiwi plant in a spate of madness 3 weeks ago, removing every leaf and branch until only the main stems were left. Kiwi plants grow to an unmanageable size, and I should never have planted it as I don't have that amount of space. The plant bled profusely for the first 3 days! I couldn't figure out where all the drip was coming from, until I noticed that the wounds were bleeding from 3 main arteries where the most recent shoots had been thrusting from. It was buckets of kiwi sap, if I had collected it, until it finally stopped completely after 5 days. The sheer osmotic pressure from the powerful root system was awesome to behold. I wondered if the thing would die, but fortunately it has survived and is putting out new shoots. A 6 year old kiwi plant, attacked ruthlessly in mid-season. If the damn thing would only fruit just once, but they are sexual, and this is only the lonely female, with no male around.

The clay soil of the allotment has been a lesson in humility. To grow food on untreated, unimproved clay soil is nearly impossible, as all the seeds and varieties that are bred for human consumption assume that you have John Innes loam. Bah! The broad beans are yielding only one third of what they should, while beans, squashes and tomatoes grow so slowly that at times I have been crestfallen. There is a very narrow window of fertility in clay soil, and that is when the moisture content is just right, which seems to be only 25% of the time. The rest of the time, clay is either too dry and hard, or too waterlogged, for normal vegetables to grow, even if you give it water when it dries up. Even weeds struggle! Only plants that bide their time and have plenty of time to bide can grow well in clay soil, and in the English growing season, nobody has ever bothered to breed vegetables suited to clay soils. Commercially, they would just plough it often, then dump lots of nitrogen fertilizer on it and grow wheat, potatoes or grass on it. They wouldn't bother using it for any other food you find at the supermarket.

I deduce that it will take another 2 years of cultivation before this soil reaches a reasonable level of productivity. Meanwhile, if it weren't for the Tescos, Sainsburys, Asdas, and Morrisons of the world, I would be starving as badly as any African. It makes me sick how ignorant people are about how food is produced. If I were a farmer on the Archers, I would be tempted to let the land lie fallow and let the population wonder where the food has gone. The English people are quite happy to cover up England's bountiful arable lands with concrete roads, parking lots, airport runways, shopping malls, suburban housing developments and industrial parks. The United Kingdom is only 60% self-sufficient in food, but is more than 600% self-sufficient in proselytizing about economic globalization and international human rights. The fools that bang on about how other countries should be run, drive to their supermarket and stuff their cars with plastic bagfuls of food flown from parts of the world where people are starving and malnutritioned. Being overfed, indolent and even obese, they don't need to eat half as much as they do, and even worse than that, they throw away half of what they buy. Is there any way to teach these people a lesson? Maybe they should be sent out to Africa or Haiti or Bangladesh and forced to live on half a portion of rice per day. That will be the day. We don't even do that to mass murderers in prison.

World Naked Bike Ride in London 2008

The annual naked bike ride in London took place yesterday, starting as usual from Hyde Park Corner, but this time at 3.30pm. It was one week later than events elsewhere in the World Naked Bike Ride.

The day was partly cloudy, and slightly nippy. Consequently, the turnout was probably a bit less than last year.

I wonder if countries like Saudi Arabia, Singapore, India, China, and Kenya will ever have naked bike rides? In London, spectators are still amazed by the spectacle, and those who are appalled are more appalled at the spectacle of body honesty than nakedness. Ask anybody about the Naked Bike Ride, and their response will be, oh yes, they like it when an attractive young person of their sexual preference sails past. Their cameras are clicking away either for this reason, or because they want to prove to their mates that they saw all these loopy nutters riding their bikes without any clothes on. Even in post-liberal, totally-internetted England, nudity is still a major engine of sexual stimulation. This probably makes sense, since in cold countries, clothes are for most of the year a physical necessity for keeping warm, so seeing a naked person outdoors will always be a seasonal novelty.

I would like to hand a cheer to all the non-porn-stars who participated in the London naked bike ride. For they once again injected a forgotten humanity into a society that gloats about its own humanitarianism. This is the humanity of the human animal body, the one which many people deny until they are humbled by a nurse or a doctor while lying in a hospital bed.

Back in 1983 when I was a new adult, I paid my first ever visit to a naturist beach. It was in the south of France. My companion was brave and determined to strip off. I followed suitless. As we lay there, in the glorious sunshine by the Mediterranean, watching crowds of nude naturist French families having their picnics and swimming, one particular group caught my eye.

The young woman was a stunning beauty, with a body that all women would crave to have, and all men crave to touch. She was with her infant daughter and her mother. Her daughter would be a beautiful woman one day. Her mother was no longer the subject of any man's attentions, and in fact appeared to have made no attempt to fight the gravity and wear of ageing, but she was unashamed and "bien dans sa peau", she was with her family, and they were all together, having their day out on the beach.

I looked at them and thought how the young woman must be so much wiser than many in Anglo-Saxon lands. Here she could have no delusions that one day she will sport her mother's body, but she learns not to fear the day. She learns to live today, to love today, and already has accomplished her birthright of passing her genetic blessings to her daughter. No neurotic reluctant motherhood here.

Three generations of the family females, naked together on the beach, living on a sunny warm day. How natural, how lovely. With no commentary by David Attenborough, either. It is sad that only in such places may we learn what we are, and why we exist. It is sadder yet that even in 2008, a naked bike ride in London can never approach the beauty and education of such a scene. A naked bike ride in London makes less of a dent on the population's behaviour than does the rising price of that substance abuse - oil.

Burning Plastics

A lot of homo sapiens evolved to like fires. In countries with cold nights, fires kept people warm. Under open skies, fires frightened away wolves, tigers, or other predators. Inside dark caves and rooms, fires lit up the walls and created little worlds that could be seen with their eyes.

So to many people, burning wood seems natural. Indeed, a forest fire in any part of the world wastes more energy and carbon dioxide than a thousand (and usually millions and billions) home wood fires.

In a world overflowing with plastic waste from every angle, it is tempting to burn the plastics as well, is it not? What could be more self-sufficient? Especially if you can make heat or electricity from it, should it not be good for the planet?

So today's prize weblink is given to the simplest:

Separate plastics – separate plastic waste from other waste. Do not burn any plastics in your yard or house.
Avoid plastics – Avoid plastics, in particular do not purchase goods packed in PVC packaging, which generates dioxins when burned.
Reduce waste – Buy products that can be reused or refilled (glass and metal containers)

To which I add: Buy less, Use less, Waste less.

But if you have been puzzled by all the recycling codes on all the bits of plastic packaging of things beautifully manufactured in China and elsewhere, enlighten yourself with the Resin Identification Code.



Look out for Number 3
Vinyl and PVC
Are BAD x 3



Further websites of interest, all Googled, I confess:

http://www.cielap.org/pdf/032304_timeontario.pdf

A 2002 study from the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) states that "backyard barrel burning" is the largest source of dioxin and furan emissions in the US, and a 2003 Environment Canada report indicates that this practice is the largest remaining single source of environmentally occurring dioxins in Canada. The burn barrels of less than 40 households can release the same combined amount of dioxins as a modern incinerator designed for servicing up to 120,000.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem00/chem00031.htm

Some types of plastic contain elements besides the standard carbon,hydrogen, and oxygen. Nylons contain nitrogen, and polyvinyl chloride contains, of course, chlorine. These constituents also find their way into the combustion products. Probably the particular component you have heard about most is TCDD, which is an abbreviation for the chemical name tetrachloro-dibenzo-dioxin. This compound contains four chlorine atoms, and is inevatibly formed when polyvinyl chloride plastics are burned. (Complete combustion of PVC would yield only water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen chloride; in practice, some incomplete combustion products such as TCDD are
always formed, if at low levels.) TCDD is also formed when wood burns, because wood also contains small amounts of chlorine. Because of the much higher proportion of chlorine in PVC, however, it is the material leading to the highest levels of TCDD.
The toxicity of TCDD to animals is well-established. It is often considered to be the man-made compound most toxic to animals. Its toxicity to humans,however, is not as well-established. The only absolutely confirmed human health effect from exposure to TCDD is a skin rash called chloracne. Other health effects are suspected. It is considered a carcinogen on the basis of animal studies.

TCDD is also an unwanted by-product of the manufacture of the herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. A manufacturing accident at a plant manufacturing these chemicals occurred near Sevesto, Italy in 1976 released an estimated 1-10 lb of TCDD into the surrounding countryside, killing many farm animals and causing chloracne. Since 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T were components of the defoliant "Agent Orange" used in Vietnam, many U.S. servicemen (and of course Vietnamese) were exposed to elevated levels of TCDD. TCDD is thus suspected as the cause of the symptoms attributed to "Agent Orange" exposure.

Richard E. Barrans Jr., Ph.D.
Assistant Director
PG Research Foundation, Darien, Illinois

http://dnr.wi.gov/environmentprotect/ob/agplasticseffects.html

Some of the most dangerous chemicals created and released during burning some types of plastic are dioxins.... Dioxins, which are byproducts formed when chlorine-containing products are burned, tend to adhere to the waxy surface of leaves and then enter the food chain. Even if certain types of plastic (such as polyethylene or polypropylene) do not contain chlorine, other materials attached to or burned with the plastic may be a chlorine source.

Other chemicals released while burning plastics include benzo(a)pyrene (BAP) and other polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which have both been shown to cause cancer. If film or containers are contaminated with pesticides or other harmful substances, those will also be released into the air. If plastics are burned with other materials, additional toxic chemicals may be created from the interaction of the different substances.

Earth Calling Canada: Stop Killing Everything

Canadian Geographic magazine has two outstanding features in the June 2008 issue. One is a revealing look at the Albertan Oil Sands development. The other is about the selfish greedy proposals to Strip-mine British Columbia's Flathead Valley.

What more proof do you need that Canadians are not angels when it comes to the love and protection of Nature? After all, these are the people who bludgeoned Seal-Pups to sell furs to Europeans; they are the people who raped the waters of all the fish in the Grand Banks of the North American East Coast until the cod disappeared, and even after 25 years, has not recovered; these are the people whose greed to grow grain in the Prairies created Dustbowls where once lived whole stable ecosystems.

Some of the maps and pictures of the oil sands extraction scarring Alberta are quite simply shocking. The eventual area to be damaged seems to be the size of the whole of England, if not more. Canadians have worshipped the car, and now they worship the money that comes from the oil that feeds the cars. I dare not even look on a Google Earth satellite photo... the rage it would bring up in me has to be managed.

As for the Flathead Valley, I suspect that now that British Columbia's economy is dominated by the mass economic migration from Hong Kong in the last 25 years, there is a complicity of ignorance and meekness at the prospective rape of the ecology in one of Earth's more bountiful climate systems (the Temperate, Rainy zones on the Eastern edges of the Great Oceans, namely places like Chile, Britain, and British Columbia).

Why should I assume ignorance and meekness when Greed will do? Why should you?

After all, they want the low-grade coal that is in the Flathead Valley. That's what they're doing in China. That's what they want to do in Canada.

Meanwhile the consumption habits of North Americans and Europeans are unabated as they endlessly buy gadgets, goods and machines that are Made in China. So whose fault is it ultimately? Is it the The Ignorant Consumer or is it the greedy Corporations and the Wealthy Private Elite that together rule their lives? It is probably all of them.

Letting Living Things Cross the Road

Canada.

You think of vast open spaces. Unspoilt. Pure, even when not smothered by snow and ice.

Oh yes, Canada is the place for every (well, at least the ones that hate hot weather or their countrymen) American who dreams to get away . Once called "The Great White North" by Second City comedians. Bears strolling about in the street. Salmon leaping up rivers, begging to be caught. Royal Canadian Mounties. European-descended Protestants living in small homely towns as close to their farming roots as possible. Lumberjacks and Fishermen and Boatsmen. Canada, the land once known for "Hewers of Wood and Bearers of Water."

The reality? Roads, roads, more roads and sprawling cities that are endlessly spreading their drab suburbia, and cars filling up all these roads, killing everything in their path.

Roadkill has always been a major problem in Canada. Canada has in the past always assumed that it had so much land, so much wilderness, that what gets killed on the road does not matter. Canadians have always taken the side of the car. For example, any anecdotes about an encounter between a moose and a car will always blame the moose. This will be rejoined by the Canadian habit of over-earnest familiar solicitousness, firstly for the driver's safety but more importantly for the car's outcome. Was it a write-off? No, not the moose, of course they mean the car!

These days, you don't see dead animals by the sides of the big main roads. No, because all the animals along those roads have given up and been killed. But if you drive on the quieter, straight and boring county and rural roads of Southern Ontario, you will see freshly killed animals - deer, raccoons, and many ugh others that you don't really want to pause to identify.

The truth is that although Canada is large, the amount which is south of the 45th Parallel (45 degrees North latitude line) is very scarce. This bit of Canada, which lies entirely in the Province of Ontario with Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario and the St Lawrence River bounding it, is Southern Ontario.

Southern Ontario south of the 45th Parallel has a land area about the same as the Republic of Ireland. Cover this up with industrialized farmland, roads, cities, shopping malls, parking lots, endless suburbs, endless lakeside Cottage Development, and Earth Calling Canada: YOU have a Problem!.

Indeed, Toronto is so devoted to cars, parking lots, roads and sprawling suburbia, that David Cronenberg, its most famous native Film Director, was inspired to make the film "CRASH". Since he made that film, which satirizes the human sexual attraction to cars in a built landscape that worships the car, there are even more towering buildings that overlook the dreadful 401 that ploughs right across the city from east to west.

The 401 is a hideous example of Twentieth Century North American civilization. Even by the mid-1970s, most of the 20 mile length of the 401 in Metropolitan Toronto had TWELVE LANES. There never was any way any animal could cross that road and ever survive.

So it seems very obvious: roads, highways, and motorways, should only ever be built with tunnels and bridges for animals and land invertebrates so that they can safely cross the road.

It is obvious. Isn't it? Let living things Cross the Road, safe from Killing Cars. Why is something that has been obvious to me for 30 years only now getting into the Toronto Star?

Do countries like China and India want to make these same mistakes as the United States and Canada did so many years ago? China and India can build their roads with tunnel and bridge crossings for living things. Or they could just concern themselves with feeding their burdensome populations and satisfying the materialistic indulgences of their wealthy elite classes.

Global Overheating in Los Angeles

The ghastly people of Los Angeles already have all their air conditioners running on full blast, and it's only the end of April! It's a new record, and yes, the planet is still overheating, even if it isn't obvious to people in Western Europe, who have had a delayed spring because of the tail-end of the La Nina (the cold backlash that comes after an El Nino).

Air conditioning is one of the most wasteful of all consumer extravagances, and I simply deplore the entire population of Los Angeles for their disgraceful new April Electricity Record. If they can't stand the heat, they should get out of the kitchen, and stop eating themselves into their Obesity Carriers, also known as SUVs.

Lard Arses. Selfish, self-obsessed lard arses who don't give a damn for anybody else. Los Angeles is the Sodom and Gomorrah of the 20th Century, so why should I be surprised?

Chinese boycotting French Goods

The interesting bit is that Carrefour has got 100 hypermarkets in China. Is it obvious yet that globalization is a disease that covers the face of the Earth?

Will the bourgeois wealthy in Beijing and Shanghai join the boycott? I can't imagine how the Chinese will live without brandy. They might have to go back to rice wine. As for the working class? They'll just have to give up booze, because rice prices are at record levels.