Climate & environment – Mar 29

-California: climate change law won’t hurt economy
-Forest loss slows, as China plants and Brazil preserves
-Exclusive Excerpt: Hack the Planet
-Breaking the Growth Habit: A Q&A with Bill McKibben
-How the Conservatives dodged the climate bullet
-NASA: It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be sent in 2010
-The Secret of Sea Level Rise: It Will Vary Greatly by Region
-The Big Melt
-A Pioneering Biologist Discusses The Keys to Forest Conservation

Peak Moment 169: The Sacred Demise of Industrial Civilization (transcript added)

As a historian, Carolyn Baker has a keen eye for current events that are indicators of the collapse we’re seeing all around us. But she’s also a psychologist concerned about how we personally navigate the turbulence and find meaning within it. The author of Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, she describes the old story that isn’t working anymore (humans are separate from nature), and the new story we must live by for real sustainability.

The collapse of journalism / The journalism of collapse

The first step in crafting a new narrative for journalists is to reject technological fundamentalism and deal with a harsh reality: In the future we will have to make due with far less energy, which means less high-technology and a need for more creative ways of coping. Journalists have to tell stories about what that kind of creativity looks like. They have to reject the gee-whizzery of much of the contemporary science and technology reporting and emphasize the activities of those with a deeper ecological worldview.

The Activist – Spiritual Divide

Can we bridge the divide between the activist  and the interior / personal side of ourselves? I think we’ll need to if we’re to deal with the intense challenges we now face. The intense challenges are the steps in the transition to a low-carbon future, steps we must collectively take, willingly or no. The problem isn’t a lack of technology so much as a lack of evolutionary preparedness in us. Integrating the activist and the interior / personal side of ourselves is a challenge we’ve scarcely considered. We’re going to.